


The Bluest of Blue

by SinceWhenDoYouCallMe_John



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alaska, Alternate Universe, Angst with a Happy Ending, Animal Death, Bluegrass, Body Dysphoria, Camping, Denali National Park, Dual Timeline, Eventual Happy Ending, Hiking, John Watson POV, John Watson is a Ranger, John Watson looks hot as fuck in a Ranger uniform, M/M, National Park Ranger AU, Oops what will happen when they have to share a single tent, Period Typical Homophobia, Period Typical Transphobia, Romance, Sherlock Holmes is a Scientist, Strangers to Lovers, The circle of life will definitely occur in this fic, Trans Character, first person POV, past references to child abuse, strap-on sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-03
Updated: 2018-06-25
Packaged: 2019-03-26 15:09:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 196,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13860315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SinceWhenDoYouCallMe_John/pseuds/SinceWhenDoYouCallMe_John
Summary: John Watson's 10th season as a Denali National Park Ranger was shaping up to look like all the years before.Until a special team from Europe was flown into the Park for a summer-long wolf-tracking research project, and the head of that research team was wearing a perfectly tailored suit.





	1. Denali Primer

**Author's Note:**

> I woke up two weeks ago and thought, "oh my god, why haven't I written a Park Ranger AU?!" My partner has worked as a Denali Ranger, I've spent some quality time up there with her, I love AU's, and I love putting John and Sherlock in the great outdoors.
> 
> The playlist for this fic is: bluegrass! bluegrass! bluegrass! Each chapter will have 1 traditional and 1 "newgrass" song for you to enjoy. The people in Denali love their bluegrass, and even hold an annual bluegrass festival near the park (as well as around Alaska in general).
> 
> The title, "The Bluest of Blue," comes from the Jimmy Martin song "Ocean of Diamonds."  
> The chorus is:  
> -  
> I'd give an ocean of diamonds or a world filled with flowers  
> To hold you closely for just a few hours  
> Hear you whisper softly that you love me too  
> Would change all the dark clouds to the bluest of blue  
> -  
> Listen to "Ocean of Diamonds" by Jimmy Martin [HERE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7v3zrgRhwMI).
> 
> For your newgrass, listen to my all-time favorite musical Sarah Jarosz sing "Come On Up to the House" [HERE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THh_hWrGXYw).

Hello, you! 

Thanks for joining me on this Park Ranger romance adventure. Before we dive in, I wanted to start with a quick primer about Denali. As fun as it is to write mile-long author’s notes, there’s a lot of terminology and places in this fic that might be unfamiliar, so I wanted to give as much information as I could up-front to make it easier for you to read!

This information is largely based off my own experiences and personal knowledge. My partner has worked as a Denali Park Ranger, and I had the good fortune of spending some quality time deep in the park with her. This isn’t meant to be a definitive history on Denali, or a perfect description of the National Park Service. I’m sure I’ll get plenty wrong! But hopefully this will give you a good picture of what’s going on before you start to read.

Denali National Park, originally named Mt. McKinley National Park, is the third largest National Park in the U.S. It’s in the interior of Alaska, southwest of Fairbanks and north of Anchorage. The Park was established in 1917, and is centered on the main mountain peak of Denali, which is the tallest peak in North America. (You may know this mountain as Mt. McKinley – the name was officially changed by President Obama in 2015 to the word ‘Denali’ – which is the native Athabaskan word for the mountain, the Native American tribe from that region).

Visiting this National Park is very unique, because the vast majority of the park is inaccessible to your typical visitor! There are only a handful of official hiking trails in the park, and only one Park Road that goes from the Park Entrance out to Kantishna. Aside from that, the only way to explore the park is by hiking through the backcountry – meaning there are no trails, no signs, no roads, just you and the landscape and the wild animals.

 

\--

 

The Park Road: 

Visitors can take their cars only a few miles into the park – after that, you need to be on an official park bus in order to go further. The park bus system is very extensive, with different busses going out to different stops along the road. Many of the Denali bus drivers have been doing it for literally decades, making for a very tight community among the staff. The “Kantishna Experience” is the bus tour that you pay for to take you from the Park Entrance (the East Side) all the way out (7ish hours one way) to Kantishna, the end of the Park Road and where some fancy lodges are located. A Ranger will narrate your drive out there, and you stop for photo opportunities. 

The road is one lane and dirt, and there are some sections that are extremely difficult to navigate. These bus drivers are incredibly skilled. Many times busses pass each other with just inches to spare on either side, and a drop off down a cliff on the edge of the road (yes, literally).

Employees drive government vans on the Park Road, which we will see come up later! Most visitors coming to Denali only experience the park through these bus tours. Only those that have the skills and supplies to do more extensive hiking or backpacking really go off from the main road and get to see more of the park.

 

\--

 

Places in the Park:

Park Entrance: The East Side. This is where most visitors’ entire experience of Denali happens (unless they take a bus down the Park Road). This contains the main Visitor Center, gift shop, restaurants, Science Center, the train depot, bus stations, a few of the official trails, the sled dog kennels, etc. It’s your typical ‘national park’ setup, where there’s paved walking roads, signage, parking lots, and the rest. Many Rangers start off in Denali working on the East Side, and then eventually choose to move out West.

C-Camp: This is the staff housing on the East Side. The vast majority of Denali park staff are seasonal – meaning they only work in the park for the summers. This park is closed during the winter, due to the snow. The only people staying on year-round all stay on the East Side, and they include people like the heads of East and West side interpretation, a few high ranking rangers, some law enforcement to do winter patrols, and a full staff in the sled dog kennels to do winter runs and training.

McKinley Park: The small town just outside the park entrance on the other side of the train tracks. Filled with hotels, lodges, and also a small community where many park staff live (rather than living in the temporary staff housing inside the park at C-Camp). 

Sled Dog Kennels: The sled dogs are SO CUTE. All sled dogs in this fic are real ones I had the chance to meet and hang out with. East side Denali staff are given the option to sign up to be a sled dog walker, where you are assigned a sled dog to walk a few times a week. The sled dogs each have their own little pens with a hut to sleep in, and their name badge painted on the front. During the summer, they pull a sled with wheels, and in the winter, they do the normal sledding. The highlight of most visitors’ trips to Denali NP is viewing the Sled Dog show, which the Interpretive Rangers working in the kennels hold twice a day to show off the dog’s mushing abilities (and general cuteness / badassery).

Toklat: The West Side. This is where John lives and works, and where my partner did as well. This is a much smaller Ranger station about 3 hours into the park, where a handful of Rangers and maintenance crews live and work for the entire summer. Toklat mainly serves as a rest stop for the visitors on the bus tours. There is a huge tent (literally a tent, not a building), which functions as a mini visitor center and also an Alaska Geographic bookstore / gift shop. There’s also bathrooms and a viewing platform with binoculars and huge moose antlers you can hold up to your head and take pictures with. The staff housing is farther down the road, and contains staff cabins, offices, maintenance facilities, and a rec room. The staff living in Toklat are pretty remote – you have to drive all the way back to the East Side for any amenities (at the extremely small store in McKinley Park – if you want actual groceries, rangers take turns making the 4+ hour drive into Fairbanks to stock up on food).

Eielson Visitor Center: One hour deeper into the park from Toklat, this is the park’s other main Visitor Center. It’s recently been renovated and looks absolutely amazing – built practically into the hillside and with a high energy efficiency rating. This is where most of the Rangers living at Toklat work, staffing this visitor center, leading guided hikes on the two main trails branching off from Eielson.

Wonder Lake: The lake that’s about 6 hours into the park along the Park Road. There’s a canoe that staff can take out into the center of the lake, and it’s so scenic and remote and gorgeous you’ll want to cry. One ranger lives out at Wonder Lake for the summer in the tiny staff housing there in order to staff the little desk for visitors. There’s a few trails that branch out from there, as well as a campground (one of the few campgrounds inside the park).

 

\--

 

Park Rangers:

In this fic, John is a Law Enforcement Ranger. These Rangers are tasked with ensuring safety within the park, for both visitors and the animals. It’s the most military-esque position within the Park Service. Most often, Enforcement rangers are called on scene if someone is hurt (they’re all EMT’s), or a visitor is endangered by (or endangering) a wild animal, or if backpackers are disregarding the rules for hiking and camping in the backcountry. Some of them, like John, carry a gun. They spend the majority of their time doing patrols along the Park Road.

Other types of Rangers:

Interpretive: These are the Park Rangers you most likely think of. The ones in the visitor centers, leading hikes, giving presentations, etc. The abbreviation used for this field is “Interp.”

Backcountry: Denali backcountry rangers mostly work in the Backcountry offices on the East Side. These rangers hold training sessions that you *must* go through and pass in order to be allowed to backcountry camp in the park. They give safety and training for how to hike in the backcountry, are in charge of assigning permits to camp, and every other week do backcountry hiking patrols to make sure visitors haven’t been lost, or damage anything, or that there isn’t a new animal kill site which means that Unit should be temporarily shut down. 

What the heck are Units? The backcountry of Denali is separated into Units. Only a certain number of people are allowed to camp in each unit per night, so you need to apply for a permit. This is to ensure that you will not come across any other people while you’re hiking or camping, and to lessen the negative effects on the landscape. Backpacking campers are *not allowed* to be visible from the Park Road when they set up camp. If bus drivers or Rangers spot a tent, it’s the Law Enforcement Rangers’ job to determine who those people are, and try and apprehend them on the way back to explain the rules.

Scientists: These people are considered Rangers, but work in the park to do research. Ecologists, geologists, animal scientists, etc.

GS-Levels: National Park staff have GS-levels. Very beginner park staff (such as those working the entrance payment booths, or first year workers) are GS-3 and GS-4. The more experienced and advanced you get (and/or the more higher education you achieve), you can move up to GS-5, GS-7, GS-9. Rangers at GS-11 are managers and heads of staff. GS-13 would be the Chief of Interpretation or the Head Ranger for the Park.

SCA: I mention SCA in the fic – this stands for Student Conservation Association. I….. honestly didn’t research whether this existed in the time period I’m placing this fic. Just pretend it did. The SCA is a way for mostly students and young people fresh out of college to do internships in conservation, such as in National Parks. They wear an SCA uniform instead of the traditional Park Ranger uniform.

 

\--

 

Wild animals: 

Animals in Denali include foxes, brown bears (of which Grizzly bears are a type), caribou (reindeer are domesticated caribou), moose, wolves, dall sheep, and your standard smaller animals and birds. Surprisingly, there has only been one death by bear attack in the park’s history (and it was by a guy who was doing something stupid). However, bears are literally everywhere. You could be hiking and literally come across a giant wild bear. Bear safety is HUGE in Denali (as well as moose safety). I won’t say more now because we’ll learn a lot during the fic!

 

\--

 

Whew – I’m sorry that was a lot! But hopefully now you get a better sense of how Denali operates, and how John’s life as a Ranger would function.

For a park map, see [HERE](http://www.nps.gov/dena/planyourvisit/maps.htm#11/63.4701/-149.9496).

For the standard Ranger uniform, see [HERE](http://www.madetomeasuremag.com/clothes-make-the-ranger-national-park-service-uniforms-serve-a-vital-need).

For some gorgeous images of Denali, see [HERE](http://www.nps.gov/dena/learn/photosmultimedia/photogallery.htm).


	2. April 1991

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Traditional bluegrass: Listen to Emmylou Harris sing "Wayfaring Stranger" [HERE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqHp5CDl4yQ).
> 
> Newgrass: Listen to Kristin Andreassen, Aoife O'Donovan, and Sarah Jarosz sing "Simmon" [HERE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJiAe87WBy4).

April 1991

It was the first day of April, and the cold sky was clear, and the mountain was calling my name. 

I turned the key in the rusted lock of my winter cabin for the last time, reaching out to pat her log side like an old horse before running my fingers through my too-long hair.

It had been a harsh winter. Chattering bones and barely enough firewood and one particularly bad week when I was left eating cold canned soup in the dark when my generator died, and the walls of snow were too damn high to get my mobile the seven miles into Talkeetna for extra supplies.

It had been long hours hauling water through hip-deep snow, fixing leaks in the old roof, and hiding away in the never-ending darkness until the flashlight batteries wore out and the pages on the book in my hands grew brittle with the cold.

It had been exactly the same as every other winter for the nine years that came before it.

My mobile took me straight into Talkeetna, long blankets of white stretched as far as the eye could see. I looked back once at the cabin before turning the final bend, watching it disappear into the sea of green trees. I wanted to feel anxious about leaving the quiet, but I could feel Denali at my back like a siren’s call piercing the sky. Everything I owned besides the bare bones of the cabin was packed in the two canvas bags strapped to the sled.

I picked up a cheap coffee in town, knocking the thick snow from my boots outside the door and doing small talk with the woman behind the counter who I only ever saw four times a year – once on the first day of the season, once on the last day of the season, and twice during the winter for my main supply runs. She didn’t know my name, and I didn’t know hers. 

“Gonna be a good season for ya,” she said, like she said every year.

I nodded over the coffee steam. “Hope so.”

“Rangers on the radio said you’ve got some big shot researchers coming out,” she said. “Something ‘bout the wolves.” She was missing her front teeth, and I couldn’t remember whether they had been there before.

I shrugged. “Guess so,” I said. “Last year it was the caribou. Must be going up the food chain.”

She didn’t laugh at my bad joke. She told me the same thing she told me every year on the first day of April as the shop door swung behind me. “Say hi to them bears. Don’t get killed.”

My Ford was parked exactly where I left it six months before. After nearly an hour of shoveling off snow and jumping the engine, my two bags were slung in the back, and the windows were rolled down, and I was speeding down Highway 3 towards the vast northern horizon, with the mountain peaks cradling me high on my left and the vast open land to the right. I stopped in Cantwell for another coffee – that one even worse. The Athabaskan woman behind the counter rolled her eyes. I knew her name.

“So, you survived another winter,” Chena said, handing me my change. “You know I gotta brew three times as much coffee the first week of April than normal. All you Rangers coming back from your winter hideouts, and your hair’s too long.”

I tipped my faded baseball cap at her – the one I always wore during that first drive back, with the faded stitched-on image of a jumping King Salmon, “Nushagak River” written on the front. “Just getting you ready for all the tourists. Practice run.”

She huffed. “No tourist busses make a stop here in Cantwell. Unless someone’s gotta pee so badly they can’t make it to your neck of the woods in Talkeetna, or on to Anchorage.”

I looked out the faded window at the one-lane dirt road dotted with snow. “Talkeetna’s bathrooms are state of the art,” I said to her. “You should see them these days. They even got real toilet paper.”

Chena threw a wadded-up ball of receipt paper at the back of my head as I walked out. “Say hi to them bears, Ranger,” she said. “Hope one of ‘em gets ya.”

By the time the outline of the buildings of McKinley Park came into view, my lungs were nearly aching for a breath of the fresh air. My eyes kept scanning to my left like they always did, praying to catch a glimpse of the mountain through the fog. As if I didn’t know it was nearly impossible to see a clear view of Denali in the beginning of April.

My hands were shaking when I drove through the abandoned park entrance, making my way down roads I could navigate with my eyes closed until I made it to the center of C-Camp. I nearly moaned out loud when I jumped down from my truck, and the Denali gravel crackled under my boots for the first time in half a year. My breath was a perfect cloud of fog.

The place was empty – I was always one of the first ones to arrive. I dumped my stuff down on the bunk in one of the temporary rooms and made my way over to the offices, taking my time to walk down the roadside trail and letting the icy air slap against the bare skin of my neck above my coat. I meant to go into the offices and check-in with the year-round Rangers – see how the winter patrols went, and whether the new sled teams had been fully trained, and what I would be expected to do for this year’s training as one of the few GS-9’s on staff – whether there were any new Law Enforcement Rangers posted out in Toklat I’d need to train.

Instead my feet crunched through the fresh snow farther down the lone road, until the achingly familiar sight of the sled dog kennels came into view. I stepped over the metal gate and pulled off my gloves with my teeth, and at the sound of my soft whistle twenty furry heads poked out of their sleeping huts. The dense air filled with barks and happy yips, and a part of me that always dimmed during the long winters came back to life.

I made my way past each dog in their fenced yards, stopping to give a quick pat and get a lick on the hand. I knelt when I came to the last wooden hut in the line, sticking out my hand so the little nose could catch my scent.

A part of my chest clenched when a familiar pair of cloudy grey eyes emerged from the hut, nose sniffing madly at the air. The old dog stepped out of the warm shadows on shaking legs, limping a bit towards my hand before pressing his face fiercely into my chest.

He was crying, whimpering and wriggling in my arms, and I gripped his fur tightly in my fingers. “Hey there, Lugnut,” I whispered. I buried my face between his ears as he leaned his weight against me. “Alright, old man,” I said, desperately glad I was alone so no one could hear my strained voice. “Wasn’t that long since I last saw you, huh? Been a good boy for me, haven’t you? Didn’t miss me too much?”

He licked softly at my scruffy cheeks and over my chapped lips. Lugnut had been assigned as my walking dog my first season in Denali, back when I was fresh-faced and wide-eyed at it all, newly promoted up to a GS-7 after years spent working Enforcement patrol rounds in Canyonlands and Death Valley. I had been stationed near the main Visitor Center at C-Camp, making sure no visitors did anything stupid like drive off the road, or try to touch a wild animal, and even though I was only required to walk Lugnut twice a week, every single morning found me showing up at the kennels near dawn with his leash in hand. Even five years later once I was promoted out to Toklat as head of West-side Enforcement, I had still driven one of the old government vans three hours back to the park entrance every other weekend just to see him.

I held him for a long time, breathing in the scent of his old fur. It was a scent tied up intimately with my soul – one that reminded me that Lugnut was the only living thing in Denali who I had ever really told all of my truths. Those long walks along the park road early before dawn, keeping an eye out for moose grazing off in the distance, when I would tell him about everything in my life that came before, and he would sniff us out a trail through the tundra or brush or snow.

“Thought I’d find you here.”

I turned around at the familiar, warm voice, smiling at Molly standing a few feet behind me. I hadn’t heard her walk up.

She gestured back over her shoulder. “Saw your truck in the lot. When you weren’t in the offices I thought I’d check here.”

I gave Lugnut one last pat before getting to my feet, holding out my arms to give her a long hug. “Missed you, kid,” I said.

She pulled back, frowning. “Well, I’m not a kid anymo—”

“I know, I know. You’re big shit now, aren’t you? Youngest head of the kennels Denali’s ever seen, racing sleds across the park all winter, training all the new recruits, blah blah blah.”

She slapped my arm, laughing, and I chuckled along with her. I realized it was the first time I’d really laughed in six months. She perched herself to sit along the top of one of the handrails, and I leaned down to scratch Lugnut who was sitting leaning up against my leg, tongue hanging out.

“Winter treat you alright?” I asked.

She smiled, and I could see the pride glowing behind her eyes. “Alright, yeah. Got a great training run in with the new dog team doing a weeklong run out to the old trapper cabin in Unit 13. Near zero invisibility for a couple days.”

“Who lead?”

“Clove, actually. I wanted Rupee to try it out but she kept missing my calls. Had to move her back into the line after two days.”

I nodded, amazed at how easy it was to fall into conversation with Molly after months of complete silence. It had always been that way though – ever since she showed up wide-eyed and open-mouthed the year before I got transferred out to Toklat, decked in an SCA uniform shirt with the sled dogs’ names already memorized before she’d even met them. She had taken one look at me sitting alone at the first staff campfire of the year and never let me sit alone again the whole season, even though I was fifteen years older than her with a reputation of only saying ten words all summer outside talking to visitors on my patrols.

And to my surprise, I hadn’t minded at all.

Molly watched me pet Lugnut in silence. She didn’t ask me about my winter – I would’ve given her the same answer I had nearly five times before. “ _Good. Quiet. Did some hunting. Wrote a lot. Planned new programs. Didn’t talk. Didn’t sleep._ ”

“You’ve heard about the wolf project?” she asked instead.

I looked up from Lugnut’s black nose. “Chena told me back in Cantwell. More tracking?”

Molly nodded. “Some team coming over from Europe apparently – best in the world, is what Dan and all them in the head office said. Some new research about how their territory is changing based on the higher number of visitors each year. You know – the usual stuff.”

I hummed. “Seems odd to fly in a team from Europe for that. Could easily have gotten hold of some of the researchers that have been working in Yellowstone, or Glacier.”

Molly shrugged. “I don’t think they were joking when they said the best in the world. Some genius, apparently.”

I laughed. “A genius at finding nearly invisible wolves in the fucking third largest national park? That’s a very specific type of genius.”

Molly grinned and hopped down from the rail, waiting for me to join her for the Welcome Meeting starting soon. She put her hands on her hips, lowering her voice to do an impression of Dan – our Head of Interp at the time.

“Best in the world, little Molly. I’m telling ya, best in the whole world! If he can’t find these wolves, God himself couldn’t do it, I say.”

I gave one last pat to Lugnut before reaching out to rough up Molly’s hair. “Only been two hours and I already miss the silence of my cabin,” I said, putting an arm around her shoulders as we walked.

A few minutes later, just as the buildings of C-Camp were peeking through the trees, Molly pressed her palm into the center of my back. “I missed you, too, John.”

 

\--

Before I knew it, it was two days until the park gates were set to open to the public, and I was packing up my bags from the little bunk in C-Camp to make the final trek three hours west out to Toklat.

Every second I wasn’t doing the first official summer patrols of the season I was back near the kennels. Taking Lugnut with me on some of our usual walks, stopping to rest lying beside the fresh snow or carrying him across my shoulders when he couldn’t make it any further.

Those were the walks when I always doubted myself – those last few precious days with him before I moved out to Toklat. When I would feel like the most selfish bastard on the face of the earth, stringing old Lugnut along with walks and pats before leaving him alone for the majority of the summer. When I would wonder whether I should follow the advice Molly had been giving me for years – to apply to move back East, living at C-Camp with the majority of the Rangers, where I could see him every day just like I used to years ago. When I could see Molly more than a handful of times at the odd staff meeting, and be more apart of the whole community. Join the other Rangers for pizza and beer at The Spike after a long day out on patrols. When I could walk Lugnut all morning and then join Molly and her friends for trips out to Fairbanks on long weekends, taking advantage of a real grocery store and a movie theater and civilization.

She’d been telling me to do that for years. And during those final days of orientation week when I would hold Lugnut close, and bring my books to read sitting outside his kennel hut, I would be so tempted to do it that it physically hurt in my chest.

And then I would still pack up my bags, get in the old truck, and drive the three hours out West towards the mountain – towards the little collection of cabins among the trees beside the river wash that made up old Toklat - and the relief I would feel at every passing mile left behind me would remind me that I’d die if I ever went back East.

The morning we were set to leave, we all gathered in the usual circle in the parking lot, with the cold gravel crunching like ice under our feet and the vans all packed and ready to go. Fifteen of us would go out West for the summer – not counting the maintenance team that would follow in a week, or the two lone Rangers that would man the little centers out at Wonder Lake and Kantishna. 

Nick, the new head of West-side Interp that year, ran his fingers through his beard before turning his face towards the sky and giving his customary bird call, echoing immediately across the valley towards the peaks.

“Right, folks. This is it. Speak now or forever hold your peace if you wanna stay East.” 

It was the same joke the West-side chief made every year, and only the three new GS-4 Rangers and the SCA intern laughed. My mind was elsewhere – back in the kennels where I had said goodbye to Lugnut that morning, laying down beside him in the snow by his hut until Molly softly whistled from far away that the other West-side Rangers were gearing up to leave. I patted the gun in my holster – the first day I was officially carrying it, and my body felt at ease as the familiar forest green uniform hung off my limbs – the way it was always a bit too big when I first arrived after the winters.

“As you’ve all heard, we have some guests joining us out in Toklat for the summer. Our research team way over from fancy shmancy Europe’ll be trying to find our goddamn wolves and see why they’ve been changing their hunting grounds the last decade.”

Nick gestured to his left, and for the first time I realized four strangers standing off to the side of our huddle. I couldn’t make out their faces through the sea of Ranger hat brims, and a part of me didn’t particularly care to move to try and get a better look. I’d see them soon enough. And I probably wouldn’t see them again for a single minute all summer – between me out on my patrols and them packing up to go head out into the backcountry for their tracking.

Nick was still talking, “. . . and his team have been working on a new system for tracking wolf behavior, and their territory. We want to make them feel at home out at Toklat with us, and I’m sure you’ll get to know them over the summer.”

I tuned out again, looking back behind my shoulder at the distant peaks of Denali slowly coming into focus above the thick, white clouds. I barely even realized when the group started disbanding towards their respective vans. I reached down to grab my backpack, throwing it over a shoulder and heading towards my Enforcement truck. I always made the drive out West alone, and I had one foot up in the truck when I heard my name behind me.

“Watson!”

I turned to see Nick running towards me, a bead of sweat dripping down his forehead beneath his hat brim despite the cold.

“Look, uh, might be a small change of plans here,” he said, running a hand over the back of his neck.

Something strange zipped up my spine, and I turned and leaned back against the truck to face him, crossing my arms over my chest. “This your way of telling me I gotta do Interp?” I joked.

Nick laughed. “No way, man. We’d lose all our visitors in a week.” He took a step closer, lowering his voice. “Look, I was gonna have Jess drive the research team out in her van – give them the condensed version of her ‘Kantishna Experience’ talk to get them oriented as they drove. But . . .”

My throat was dry. “Yeah?”

“But Mr. Holmes asked to ride with you.”

I frowned. “Mr. Who?”

Nick looked at me like I was a bear just learned to talk. “Mr. Holmes. Sherlock Holmes. The head of the research team.”

I blinked hard and tried to fit the pieces together. “He knows I’m not in Interp, right? How does he even know me?”

Nick shook his head at a loss. “Don’t know, Watson. Man just walked right up to me and said, ‘Let that Ranger know I’m riding with him,’ and he pointed to you.”

I huffed a laugh, shaking my head as I turned to climb back into the truck. “Well,” I said, “If the man wants to ride three hours in complete silence out to Toklat, let him be my guest.”

Nick’s shoulders sagged with relief. “I owe you one, Watson,” he called out before jogging back to the small group of Rangers still milling about. 

I didn’t watch him go, just started the engine and sat back to wait for this Mr. Holmes to climb up into my truck, thinking through in my head how I could somehow explain to him that that first drive of the season into Toklat after the snow cleared was my sacred religion, and that if he tried to talk to me the whole way there I would push him out onto the dirt road and let the bears have him.

The truck passenger door opening startled me. I stared straight ahead as a man effortlessly leapt into the seat without a word. When he was settled with his seat belt clicked I found I couldn’t get my legs to push in the pedals to move. My curiosity was raging. I looked over at him, and immediately the blood drained from my face.

Mr. Holmes was wearing a designer suit, navy blue jacket perfectly tailored and white button-up clinging to his chest as he breathed. He wasn’t wearing a coat. He stared straight ahead, running one hand of long, pale fingers through his thick head of brown curls before reaching into his breast pocket and pulling out a big black brick of a phone, somehow typing on the buttons.

I meant to start driving, but instead I heard myself ask, "The hell is that thing?”

He didn't look up. "A phone."

I stared at his hands moving over the keys. "I've never seen a phone like that . . ." I started to say.

He nodded down at his hands. "You're correct. You haven't."

My mind was screaming at me to drive - to put the car into gear and just go. But I cleared my throat and said, "Whatever you're doing, you'll lose signal in fifteen minutes. Only radio waves here on out."

He kept the device frozen in his hands and looked over at me, and immediately my mouth ran dry at his pair of pale, grey eyes. A feeling I hadn’t felt in years settled thickly in my gut, and I thought maybe I would be sick. 

He blinked once with long lashes. “Then I’d better make good use of the next fifteen minutes,” he said, in a deep voice with a British accent that took that feeling in my gut and flamed it to life up in my chest, settling between my legs in a way that made me swallow hard over a dry throat. 

I tore my eyes away and nodded, clearing my throat before pulling out of the gravel lot with shaking fingers on the steering wheel. He went back to his typing. Just as we pulled onto the Park Road, I worked up the courage to tell him what I’d originally been planning to say, even though a dark part of me wanted to hear him read the entire Dictionary out loud.

“Look, Mr. Holmes –”

“Don’t waste your breath giving me your speech about how this drive is sacred to you, and you always do it alone every year, and you’d prefer we do it in silence. I chose to ride with you to escape the inane babbling that will no doubt happen in the van holding the rest of my team and one of your Interpretive Rangers. I hope even you could make the mental connection that that means I would prefer to get this drive over with in silence as well.”

I waited to feel irritated at the end of his little speech, and instead all I could feel was a tiny bubble of happy relief brimming up in my chest. “Ok, then,” I said easily, guiding us down the Park Road through the trees, gradually letting my truck gain speed on the snow-covered dirt. 

I thought I felt his eyes flick quickly to my face, brows raised in something like mild surprise. After fifteen minutes had passed, he made an irritated sigh, and he slipped the black device back into the breast pocket of his jacket and settled back into the seat with a soft frown. It looked insane – watching his pristine, tailored suit rub against the weathered leather seats of the old truck.

Just when we were passing the Teklanika rest stop he licked his lips and spoke. “I assume you’ve got some horrible bluegrass cassette tape already in the player?”

I laughed, surprised at how easy the sound flowed from my lips. “That I do,” I said, and I reached over to flip on the old Jimmy Martin tape, the soft banjo filling the quiet air of the truck, drowning out the sound of the crunching dirt beneath the tires. I usually saved it for the first drive out to Wonder Lake, a way for me to sentimentally christen my first full patrol, but I figured I could make a little exception, just this once.

We didn’t stop the whole way to Toklat, not even for the bathroom. I forced myself to look out at the familiar scenery as it passed by – Polychrome and Geode and the flow of the Alaska Range. Denali was still covered in cloud, but I searched for it all the same. 

It felt impossible to think of the stuff I usually did on that drive – buried old moments of my past that I only ever brought out again during that first drive out to Toklat. It made me feel suddenly naked to think of them in the car next to another person, as if Mr. Holmes could hear my thoughts out loud in the silence. As if he could somehow know when I was thinking of my childhood in the block of trailers near Wind Cave in South Dakota, or the last time I saw my parents; my first winter in my cabin I built by hand outside Talkeetna, the first time I ever shot a gun with my own hands, or the day that I got on a plane headed clear across the country to New York, with money in my backpack that I would hand over under a table for a surgery I’d heard about in the back of a seedy bar.

I nearly sighed out loud as the familiar cluster of log cabins came into view around the final bend, pouring down the tree-covered mountain and spilling into the dry rock bed of that fork of the Toklat River. My spine melted once more into the seat. I thought once of little Lugnut, napping on his side in his hut back on the East side not realizing that I wouldn’t come back to walk him the next day. But it was hard to feel bad when the pressure in my shoulders evaporated as I turned off the Park Road and drove past the Toklat Visitor Tent, making our way slowly down the snow-lined gravel towards the only place I ever called home.

He didn’t say a word as we pulled in, and I didn’t offer to show him around. I parked in the main lot by the hoses to wash off the truck, and with just a single nod and a quick glance at me, Mr. Holmes hopped out of the truck still in his pristine suit, and he shouldered his bag and walked off into the trees towards the housing without even asking where to go.

And as I watched him walk up the narrow trails among the cabins, his leather shoes floating across the snow like he was lighter than air, and his suit pants clinging to his long, lean thighs, that long-forgotten feeling in my chest nearly choked me, and I tore my eyes away with a single thought: _Shit._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading! The last thing I'll say is please read the tags! Carefully! This fic will have a happy ending but there will be a few surprises and moments of angst along the way.
> 
> If you have any questions, please send them my way! Otherwise any feedback is greatly appreciated :)


	3. April 1992

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Note that the last chapter was titled "April 1991," and now, with this chapter, we are into "April 1992."
> 
> Traditional bluegrass: Listen to Doc Watson sing "House of the Rising Sun" [HERE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeiXnyvo0d4).
> 
> Newgrass: Listen to Alison Krauss and Robert Plant sing "Polly Come Home" [HERE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAL1fSBmpRA).

April 1992

For the first time in over a decade, I didn’t drive my old Ford up Highway 3 on the first day of April. I didn’t stop in Talkeetna and Cantwell for coffee – didn’t hear Chena tell me to get myself eaten by a bear.

Instead I stepped off a plane onto the freezing tarmac at Fairbanks Airport on April 8th, shivering at the sudden burst of cold that seeped under my worn coat. I quickly found my luggage at the deserted baggage claim – my big canvas duffle the only bag with an originating tag from Flagstaff, Arizona.

I hadn’t brought anything with me from the Grand Canyon other than my clothes. I’d spent the winter riding horse patrols along the bottom of the canyon – spending nights in the various trapper cabins and rest stops that dotted the rock on either side of the river on the days I didn’t ride back up to the canyon rim.

The snow there hadn’t been the same. There were nights I lay down on a cot in a comfy lodge, staring up at the ceiling with a warm meal in my belly and freshly showered hair, and I had _ached_ for my cabin – my little haven outside Talkeetna with floor to ceiling shelves of books and no running water.

I hadn’t named my horse the whole winter.

I shouldered my bags and headed to grab a taxi for the train depot – knowing I could hitch a free ride to McKinley Park if they had room, and if I flashed my badge. I didn’t think about anything on the train – tuned out the commentary going on by the train conductor for the benefit of the tourists taking disposable camera photos of the snow-covered tundra through the windows. I ignored the alarm in my head blaring “ _Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!_ ” as I stepped off the train onto the platform at McKinley before it had even finished moving, and I didn’t feel any relief at all when the Denali gravel crunched under my feet.

I made my way across the empty train platform towards the Park Entrance with my head down, trying and failing to feel like I was coming home. A week of orientation had already gone by – my contract back at Grand Canyon running a little into the start of the season at Denali. No one had minded when I’d called to say I’d be late – no one had even really asked why.

By habit my feet started leading me towards the kennels, and for the first time in months my chest seemed to unclench. Next thing I knew I was nearly running through the snow, following the paths I could take with my eyes closed until the outlines of the familiar sleeping huts came into view. I dropped my bags from my shoulders onto the ground and started to rip my gloves off with my teeth.

I didn’t stop to pet any of the other dogs coming out of their huts to say hello. By the time I made it to the last little pen I was short of breath, and my fingertips shook out of my control. There had been a day – one fateful trip over that winter – when my horse had been spooked by a bobcat leaping out of the snow. He’d reared, and I’d fallen hard onto my ass onto snow-covered rocks. By the time I’d gotten my horse back under control, and made sure neither of us were hurt, I realized that every last drop of water I had was currently seeping into the dirty canyon snow. It took a day and a half to get back up out of the canyon and on to civilization, and the first sip of water I had outside eating old snow had been the most precious moment of my entire life.

And then, kneeling before Lugnut’s old hut, that same feeling of desperate need flooded through my veins, choking up my throat until I could barely breathe.

He smelled me and came out on arthritic knees, hobbling towards me in the snow with his tail going wild. I rushed to him and pulled him into my arms, feeling how much more skeletal and fragile he felt than the season before. 

I buried my face in his fur as he licked along my jaw. “Missed you, old boy,” I whispered as he yipped. He put his full weight against me, pushing me back into the snow until I fell over on the ground, and he perched up on my chest and buried his nose against my neck. “You have a good winter, old man? You show those new pups how things run around here?” I said as I scratched between his white ears.

And suddenly, as I lay there holding him on top of me, the whole world became blurred in my eyes. Everything I thought had been tightly packed away – everything I had slammed the door on that fateful day last August – threatened to spill over as my clothes grew damp in the snow.

It felt like hours had passed when I heard footsteps crunch behind me.

“I made dinner,” Molly said, as if no time at all had passed since I gave her an awkward hug goodbye seven months ago on the train platform right before I got on to take it to the airport in Fairbanks.

My voice was a strained little wisp when I spoke. “Dinner’d be great,” I said.

She took me silently back to her permanent cabin on the outskirts of C-Camp after I gave my last goodnight pat to Lugnut and carried him back into his hut where it was warm. Molly opened the old wooden door to a fresh wave of home-cooked chili. I let her sit me down by the shoulders at the table like a child, and I noticed that as she left the room she reached out to turn down a framed photograph – one of her and Greg Lestrade on what looked like a tropical beach. She must have taken a vacation.

“How was the Canyon?” she asked over her shoulder from the small kitchen.

I folded my hands on the smooth, carved wooden surface of her kitchen table – the one I had built for her as a present two seasons ago.

“A big hole in the ground,” I said. 

I could feel her burning curiosity in the line of her shoulders – her fierce desire to ask questions like, “ _What the hell happened at the end of last summer?_ ” or, “ _What possessed you to take a job way out in the Canyon?_ ” or, “ _Why don’t you just move back East so you can see your dog every day?_ ”

She didn’t ask, though. Instead I listened in silent relief as she told me all about her winter – their sled training runs, and the new litter of pups, and the new Ranger over from Badlands who made Molly want to pull her own hair out.

Hours after the winter sun had dipped behind the trees, I pushed away from the table and wiped my mouth on the back of my hand. “Should head back over to the dorms and nab a bunk,” I said.

Molly’s hand caught my wrist. “I got a pull-out couch for a reason,” she said, rising to open the closet in the hallway and taking down a wool quilt. She tossed it towards the couch. “You’re sleeping here, John Watson.”

I laughed to cover up the mild embarrassment burning my cheeks, awkwardly rubbing one elbow with my hand. “You get promoted to GS-13 while I was gone? Giving me orders?”

She adopted her ‘Dan-voice.’ “A hell of a lot’s changed around here, Watson, I tell ya. The mountain ain’t a mountain no more – it’s just a big column of clouds. And the moose all gotta wear pants. And the bears invite us all over for afternoon tea –”

She stopped mid-word at the mention of afternoon tea, the accidental British phrase hanging heavy and thick in the air. She cleared her throat and looked down at the floor. “Sorry, I --- I didn’t mean to bring up –”

“Don’t be sorry,” I said, knowing that poor Molly didn’t even know what she was sorry for. Didn’t know because I’d never told her.

“That’s all over now,” I went on, waving a hand. “No big deal.”

The tension in the room didn’t clear. She fidgeted the woven carpet with her toe in her thick wool sock. “I was kinda scared you wouldn’t come back this season,” she finally said in a low voice. “When you called to say you’d be late for orientation, I thought you’d just never arrive. . .”

Shame burned hotly in my chest. I walked towards her and pulled her into my arms, barely able to rest my chin on top of her head. “Aw, of course I’d come back,” I said into her hair. I rubbed her back. “I know I haven’t been . . . open with you. About last year.” I swallowed hard. “But I’ll always come back. You know I couldn’t not come back.”

She sniffed and nodded against my chest, and it pierced me with a sharp flash of pain that I had left her in so much doubt. She pulled back and quickly wiped her arm over her eyes, stepping away to pull her hair up into a messy bun. “You know you don’t need to tell me anything,” she said with a soft, teasing grin. “You can keep being the handsome, mysterious Ranger.”

I smiled at the spark lit back in her eyes as I made my way over to the made-up couch. “That’s the plan, kid,” I said, and I wished so badly that I meant it.

I waited until Molly was back in her room with the door shut, waving off her offers of a shower or pajamas and hoping I could play it off as being too lazy to deal with it all. In the darkness I stripped down to my long sleeve shirt and boxers, not wanting to get the quilts on her pull-out couch dirty with the snow and grime still clinging to my jeans. I stood there in the moonlight for what felt like a long time, looking down at the bulge just barely visible through my boxers and wondering if I could take it out of the pocket I'd long ago sewn inside. I wanted to. I never slept with it in, and it would only just become dislodged in my sleep. All Molly would see if she came out in the middle of the night and happened to knock over my whole pile of clothes would be two socks rolled together. But if anything happened, if she woke up before me, if I had to stand up . . .

I kept it in.

That night I dreamt of two pairs of pale grey eyes. The first pair looked tired and barely hanging on to life, sniffing the air and leaving wet licks across my face.

The second pair looked at me in the dawn sunrise of a small tent. “John,” the second pair whispered in a deep voice. “John, kiss me.”

 

\--

 

Two days later I made the drive out to Toklat alone in my truck, leading the caravan slowly down the snow-covered road. It was silent in the car, and I rolled down both windows even though the icy air burned my cheeks. I didn’t think of anything at all – just breathed in the scent of the snow-capped peaks and focused on the curves of the road.

Two hours in I passed the base of Geode out in the distance, where Sherlock had thrown a big fit at the top because we couldn’t find a single geode among the rocks strewn across the peak. I laughed out loud at the sudden memory, and turned towards the passenger seat to ask him if he wanted to go back this season to see if any more were there.

And when the passenger seat was empty – because of course it was empty – I bit the inside of my cheek so hard I started to taste blood, and gripped the steering wheel until my knuckles turned white with the strain.

Just as the first sight of the Toklat cabins came into view around the bend, I suddenly understood that coming back was the worst decision I’d ever made.

I didn’t stick around for the usual ‘we made it’ huddle out in the parking lot – knowing that my absence would be the farthest thing from surprising. I made my way up through the narrow little trails, cut into the hillside from decades of Ranger boots, and when each step didn’t bring any relief at all my chest ached a little more.

My usual cabin was just as I’d left it – pristine and empty as if it had never been lived in for a day. I opened all the windows to let out the stale air, unpacking my two measly bags of clothes into the small closet before starting a pot of coffee with the bag of whole coffee beans I’d left up in one of the cupboards.

I didn’t once look at the bed, as if the outlines of two bodies would somehow still be visible in the thin mattress, hidden beneath the scratchy sheets like a secret carved into the earth. I kept my eyes fixed straight on the wall as I pinned my only photograph near the pillow – a Polaroid of me and Lugnut on the last day of my first season, where my smile rivaled the sun, and his little paws were blurry from wriggling in my arms.

I cooked up a simple dinner out of the non-perishable food I’d left for myself at the end of last season, making a mental note of when to go into Cantwell or Fairbanks to re-stock up. My socked feet moved through the cabin so softly I felt like a ghost in my own place, roving from the old stove to the sink to the wooden table without ever really noticing where I was standing.

The early darkness had just settled through the thick, misty trees when a soft knock sounded at my cabin door. For one blinding moment my heart skipped a beat. Blood sang in my veins, and my feet shot me towards the door like a rocket, hand outstretched and reaching for the doorknob.

Then I froze.

It wouldn’t be the hand I was expecting to see on the other side of the door. I wouldn’t even _want_ it to be that hand on the other side of the door. Not after everything, not after what had happened . . .

I took a deep breath, ashamed at myself and furious that just two fucking days back in Denali had reduced me to some pathetic ball of weepy memories – taken the Ranger I’d once again become over the winter down in the canyon and stripped him down to a man puttering around a silent kitchen waiting for a knock at the door that would never come.

I opened the door to see Hannah, the new SCA kid on staff for Toklat. She looked nervous.

“John!” she said. She flinched. “Or, sorry, I should have said Ranger Wat—”

“John’s fine,” I said, forcing myself to look friendly. “It’s all first names around here.”

She smiled and tucked her hair back behind her ear. “Right, well . . . I was wondering. . .” She bit her lip, then the next words came out in a breathless rush. “Most of the other Rangers are all getting together for a campfire tonight, and there will be s’mores, and we’ll all start off the season together, but then you weren’t there, and I know you missed orientation because you were off at Grand Canyon, and so I thought that someone should tell you so you could maybe join us?”

My stomach clenched. In that single second of silence after Hannah finished speaking, I couldn’t decide what in the world would be more humiliating: if the other Rangers, knowing I would never join them for such a thing, put the new kid up to having to come up and invite me anyway? Or if I looked so lonely and ostracized to someone who only met me two days ago that she felt I needed an invite no matter what the other Rangers said to convince her otherwise.

And it hurt me that something so innocent and kind was making me grip the doorframe with my fingers.

I relaxed my shoulders, ducking my head to rub the back of my neck. “Aw, Hannah, I appreciate you coming up here for that, but . . . I’d like to get settled in. Need a little time to recoup.”

I caught the flash of sadness that rang in her eyes, and I realized that the latter explanation was correct.

She smiled, already starting to back away from the door. “Right, gotcha,” she said. “Well. . . next time.”

I resisted the urge to chase out after her as her blonde curls disappeared into the darkness. “But thank you,” I said, unsure if she could still hear me.

When I closed the door after her, and the silence of my cabin screamed in my ears, I suddenly couldn’t remember for the life of me why I had declined.

Hours later I sat on the edge of the thin mattress, afraid to lie back and fall asleep for fear I would once again dream of grey eyes. I was dressed in only my boxers, having turned the heat up a bit in the cabin, and the darkness hid the fact that the space between my legs looked empty; the rolled-up socks sat in the otherwise empty drawer beside my bed, hidden so I wouldn’t have to look at them with the pathetic Nike swoop stitched on in black.

A glance earlier at my staff schedule reminded me it was medication day, and the little pouch sat in my lap like a led weight. Even after decades, even sitting alone in the pitch dark, I still looked once over my shoulder as I undid the zipper, deathly loud in the silent room. The syringe was cold to the touch as I pressed it into my skin.

He had held it, once. He had held it gently in his fingers and effortlessly pushed it into my thigh, leaning forward to kiss me with a wet, open mouth as the fresh testosterone burned in my body. The fingers of his other hand had gripped tightly at my hair.

That night I only dreamt of one pale grey pair of eyes. 

 

\--

 

Three days into the season came time for my first full patrol out to Wonder Lake and back. I’d been spending the last two days getting the newer Enforcement Rangers out at Toklat up to speed – making sure they were briefed with my expectations since I hadn’t been there for orientation.

I rose early to thick darkness, the winter sun still not coming up until later in the morning. My old routine guiding my hands and feet even though it had been half a year. Boiled the water, put on coffee, dropped the spoonful of peanut butter into my oatmeal, pulled on my uniform, checked my radio and my gun, packed my bag.

The little clock hanging crooked above the stove told me I still had a good thirty minutes before I needed to report down to the offices and get in my truck. The darkness outside was just beginning to clear, bathing the wash of trees and cabins in a rich silver grey. I pulled on my boots outside on the rickety porch and shivered at the cold even under my thick jacket, taking along nothing but a can of bear spray and my morning black coffee in an old forest green Stanley travel mug. 

The cabins were dark and silent as I crept my way past, weaving through the trees and down the icy dirt slope until I emerged onto the wide, flat expanse of river rock coating the small valley. I didn’t walk far – just a few steps out until I felt surrounded by the mountains, looking out ahead at the distant row of peaks as they slowly became bathed with soft streaks of golden light, reflecting in the brambles of the tundra below.

Far off in the distance, a moose ambled across the rock, pausing once to look my way before turning his head back down to the thick grass.

I thought of Lugnut as I sipped at the thick, black coffee. Remembering the day halfway through my third season when I’d had to come back towards the Visitor Center for an emergency call, and Lugnut had smelled me passing by close to the kennels, and he’d dug at the ground until the pole attached to his leash became loose, then pulled and heaved until he was free and running through C-Camp with a leash and metal pole dragging behind him, barking up a storm with a trail of Rangers chasing after him. And I’d heard his barks and the commotion from where I was knelt over a collapsed visitor who’d been spooked by a caribou, and had to leap up and catch Lugnut before he could tackle me to the ground, slobber flying through the air as he licked at my face and yelped. 

I smiled at the memory down into my coffee, thinking of him waking up just then across the park in his little hut, probably begging for breakfast and trying to look downtrodden on purpose so someone would sneak him an extra treat.

I barely heard the footsteps coming up behind me.

“How was the hole in the ground?” a voice said – and that voice shocked through my chest and made the entire earth drop and tilt. I lost my breath, hand clenching my mug so hard I thought it might crack. My heart thudded in my chest, and I shifted my legs so I wouldn’t fall.

It was impossible.

Because that voice was supposed to be in London, clear across the world, not standing behind me in the middle of Denali just before sunrise.

I didn’t turn back, knowing that if I did I would sink to my knees and lose it.

I cleared my throat and tried to speak, hoping the line of my shoulders somehow looked steady. “The fuck are you doing here?”

I heard his feet take two more small steps on the loose river rock, echoing like earthquakes in my ears. “I assume you still have wolves in this endless wilderness,” he said casually. Too casually.

My heart leapt up into my throat, clenching my jaw and making the air shake in my lungs. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted it to be reality or the start of me going insane.

I closed my eyes, softly shaking my head. In the distance I heard the other Rangers gathering at their trucks, signaling the time for shifts to start. “I can’t do this right now,” I said out to the river rock in front of me.

The rock crunched behind me – footsteps slowly backing away. “You know where to find me,” he said.

I laughed, a harsh sound exploding from my chest. “Apparently I do,” I gritted out, hating how my eyes fought with me to turn back and see his face.

I kept looking forward, waiting for his footsteps to continue to recede into the distance. When he didn’t move, and only the wind rippled across the rocks, I started to look over my shoulder, tempted to check if he was still there.

“John,” I heard, and I shut my eyes again at my name in his voice. “I’m glad you came back,” he said, and then he was walking away, footsteps disappearing into the mountain at our backs. 

I waited until I couldn’t hear him anymore, every emotion under the sun burning in my chest. I started to turn around, figuring he was still standing near just to see my reaction. “What the hell are you trying –”

My words froze in my mouth when I saw that he really was gone – no hint of long legs or brown curls in sight. The fact that I had missed getting a look at him – proving to my eyes that he was really real, real and _here_ \- rang through me with a distressing cry so sharp it made me moan. Without thinking I bent down and picked up one of the rocks in my hand, then hurled it with all my might out across the dry bed. 

And as I threw it, shoulder straining with the sudden burst of effort, I let one word rip from my lungs in an agonized cry, echoing through the valley and rumbling up my spine.

“Shit!” I yelled out, startling even myself, and I didn’t feel any better after than I did before.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you SO much for the truly INCREDIBLE response so far to this fic! I'm delighted that so many people are as delighted at the prospect of a Ranger AU as I am :)
> 
> I don't think any new terms came up in this chapter that need to be defined, but please let me know if you have questions! Your kind feedback means more than you even realize.
> 
> Y'all are great and powerful and the best!


	4. May 1991

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Traditional bluegrass: Listen to Ralph Stanley sing "I'll Fly Away" [HERE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymF9tRrDX_0).
> 
> Newgrass: Listen to the classic "The Lighthouse's Tale" by Nickel Creek [HERE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QY7MliXa9nY).
> 
> *Heads up for some mentions of body dysphoria (at least the way John's experiencing it) in this chapter after the campfire scene.*
> 
> Enjoy :)

May 1991

The season started out as if a British man in a tailored suit wasn’t even there. 

I didn’t see him again for two weeks – not even a glimpse through the trees or a silhouette behind a closed curtain. Word among the Rangers was that Mr. Holmes was “learning every corner of the park,” but how he was doing that without ever leaving his goddam cabin was a mystery to us all, and I forbid myself from reflecting on how much it bothered me that I hadn’t seen him – hadn’t heard his voice in so many days that I’d already forgotten what it sounded like. Mostly.

I met the rest of his team, though. Two young kids still in college – Max and Barbara, who went by Babs – who anytime they even so much as mentioned Mr. Holmes got a look in their eyes that was a mix of half awe and half terror. And there was the other head researcher, Greg Lestrade – guy who looked more out of the Denali wilderness than a lecture room at Cambridge, who’d made a point of finding me on our second day out at Toklat and shook my hand, saying, “God knows why Sherlock wanted to ride with you, but congratulations for having survived.”

And I hadn’t known how to ask him why he thought I wouldn’t survive a silent car ride with no complaints – not even any whining to use the bathroom.

Molly met them all too when she and the other kennel Rangers made their traditional ‘end of week two’ visit out to Toklat for dinner and a campfire. The only campfires of the year I ever attended were the ones with Molly there. I shuddered to think of what she would do to me if I dared not to show up. I stood by her side a little back from the main group, basking in the crackling warmth of the embers on my cheeks and nursing a few lukewarm beers while the other Rangers passed around vodka and sang a horrible rendition of “Africa.”

She reached over to touch my jaw. “You need a shave,” she said, “Unless you’re trying to blend in with the bears.”

I hated the shiver of fear that ran up my spine – as if she would somehow be able to feel that the hairs on my face were the result of a needle in my thigh instead of the natural way Nick’s beard burst forth bushy from his chin and jaw. I hated that I even still thought that after two full decades living that way. And I hated even more that the touch of my closest friend had made me want to flinch away instead of lean into her palm.

I scratched the side of my face with my fingers, ruffling through my beard. “Grew it long mostly over the winter to keep my face from freezing off,” I said. “You’ll see my pretty face again soon enough once it warms up.”

She laughed beside me, bumping her shoulder into mine. “Deal,” she said. “Don’t call me if you need help pulling all the ladies off you after you shave – I’ll just stand back and laugh.”

I coughed as if I was surprised to cover over my embarrassment. “Don’t worry, kid. I know you well enough to know that you wouldn’t help me one bit.”

And I thought, standing there as Molly went back to sit with the other kennel Rangers for the rest of the fire, glancing back once at me and patting the space beside her even though I shook my head, how it was the most devastating thing in the whole damn Alaskan wilderness that I hadn’t let Molly know me well enough for her to say “guys” instead of “ladies.”

I saw Greg’s eyes land on her from where I was leaning back against a tree before Molly even noticed, riveted from across the campfire and staring through the flames. I watched the emotions on his face as if in slow motion – surprise, and awe, and determination, then fear. I understood it all. The man couldn’t have been that much younger than me, meaning he was at least ten years older than her. And he was the new guy trying to fit in, and she was the head of Kennels, gorgeous and sparkling and entertaining the whole group with her story about Disco getting terrified of a fox when he was just a pup.

I watched him slowly rise from his seat on a sawed-off log stump, making his way around the outskirts of the campfire warring with himself whether to get any closer to her or stay away. I caught his eye across the crowd, and for some reason, I felt a sudden sense of kinship pull between us – something about the way he’d shaken my hand and looked me in the eye. I nodded at him softly, and he changed course to make his way to me.

“John,” he said in greeting while raising his beer, his accent more warm and rough than Mr. Holmes’ had been.

I raised my own bottle and shoved my other hand down in my jeans pocket. “Park treating you alright so far?”

He nodded. “Bloody gorgeous, this place. I’m jealous of all you lucky bastards get to live here year after year.”

I chuckled under my breath, nodding. “It is the dream.”

We stood there in silence that didn’t feel uncomfortable at all, with the cold tree bark against our backs and the fire embers on our chests. I could feel his eyes trying and failing not to watch Molly, as she licked the melted marshmallow from her s’more off her fingers and pleaded with Jess to tell the story of the visitor who once asked her if the bears spoke ‘Native American or English.’

He cleared his throat, finally, and shifted towards me to lower his voice. “Molly Hooper. . .” he started. He coughed and cleared his throat again. “She’s . . .”

I decided to save him. “Yeah, she’s pretty great.”

He shifted his feet in the dirt. “I know you and her are . . . close. The two of you aren’t . . . well, I just want to make sure if . . .”

It was the same question I’d gotten at least three times every season without fail. I shook my head quickly, getting ready to give my usual answer of, “ _Nah, she’s like a little sister to me,_ ” or, “ _No, just my good friend,_ ” or “ _Not my type,_ ” or “ _Got my eye on another gal – go ahead._ ”

And instead, for some horrifying reason, I opened my mouth and said, “We’re not together, me and her. I don’t feel things . . . that way.”

The earth seemed to freeze. I wanted to scream and punch myself in the face and sink down away to hide in the ground. I said a silent curse under my breath, ducking my head to squeeze hard at the back of my neck and wondering when I could start to make my way back up to my cabin.

Wondering if this Greg Lestrade maybe didn’t notice the implication behind what I’d just said. Wondering if I could beg him on my hands and knees to stay silent if he did.

His hand caught my arm – I hadn’t even realized that I was starting to shuffle away. “Hey, man, don’t – it’s . . .”

I forced myself to look up at him, already trying to tune out whatever he was going to say, steeling my shoulders.

And then he said in a low voice, holding my gaze, “I, uh. . . I go both ways, myself. It’s alright.”

I blinked. ‘Relief’ was too small a word. I felt the entire park take a deep sigh. I nodded, afraid that if I tried to speak my voice would shake, leaning back against the tree next to him instead so he would know I was alright with him, too.

And just like that, after more than two decades working in the Park Service, a coworker suddenly knew that I was gay for the very first time – a coworker who I had just met a handful of days before, and who I probably wouldn’t see another day past this season.

And even if this Greg Lestrade didn’t know I hadn’t acted on anything since years before I came to Denali, aside from that one fateful night behind the bar, and even if he didn’t know I’d ever even gone by another name, he knew that I liked men. That I would sleep with them if I wanted to – if I could.

And I didn’t feel afraid.

After fifteen more minutes had passed, and the Rangers were starting to rise to go off to bed, I nodded over at Molly, who was laughing with her arm around another kennel Ranger.

“Should get to know her,” I said to Greg softly. “I have a good feeling she’d like you.”

He hid his smile behind his hand. “I feel like a bloody teenager,” he said. He pushed off from the tree trunk, brushing sap off the back of his coat. “I’ll do that, though – get to know her.” He started to walk back towards the cabins, and I called out after him.

“I’m about to say goodbye – want me to introduce you?”

He looked once more at her, biting his lip. “I’ll take things slow,” he said. “Feels right to take it slow.”

I nodded at him, waving once as he turned to disappear into the trees, inwardly wanting to fly that I still didn’t feel any fear over the fact that he _knew_.

Molly pulled me into a drunken hug when I tapped her shoulder, reaching her hand up again to scratch at my beard. “John, you dick, you left me alone the whole night!”

I laughed, smoothing her brown hair back from her face. “You looked alright enough to me.”

She held onto my shoulders hard, looking straight into my eyes. “John,” she said seriously. “John, you have to tell me.” She shook me once, her grip fierce. “Is he single?”

I threw back my head to laugh up at the stars. “He’s single alright,” I said, bringing her close against my side. “Single and pretty interested, considering he asked me if we were together after staring at you the whole night.”

Molly wrapped her arm around my waist to steady herself. “Well thank _fuck_ for that,” she said, giggling as we trudged up the slope. When we reached Jess’s cabin where Molly would spend the night, I leaned forward to kiss the top of her head on the wooden porch.

“Go after him,” I said. “He’ll say yes.”

She smiled again, eyes wet and glittering. “Now we just have to find one for you,” she said back, gripping onto my coat over my chest.

I covered her hands with my own, pulling them away to lead her towards the door. “I got a grizzly that’s interested in me over near Stony Dome,” I said. “The moose all tell me she’s great in bed – I’ll let you know how it goes.”

Molly covered her mouth and laughed as she stumbled inside the cabin. I leaned my head in, “Take care of her, Jess!” I called out, and I heard a “You got it,” coming from the bedroom.

The three beers I’d had still buzzed through my veins when I shut the door behind me to my own dark cabin, making my head spin since I’d barely eaten any dinner. Without thinking I stumbled into the bedroom instead of grabbing my shower kit and heading for the shower house like my usual end-of-day routine. 

I have no idea what came over me.

In a rush I stripped off every bit of clothing from my body except for my boxers, panting for no reason and already throbbing between my legs. For the first time in over a year, and for absolutely no discernible reason, I sat on my thin mattress and leaned back against the cabin wall, closing my eyes before reaching down to place my palm over the bulge between my legs.

I pressed down and sighed, tracing the line of it with my fingers before grinding down harder with the heel of my palm, trying to put pressure on my real skin beneath. I thought of nothing as I bucked up with my hips against my palm, keeping my eyes closed so I couldn’t see the unnatural shape of the socks up close. I was growing wet between my legs – could feel it dripping down my inner thigh. I told myself I was leaking, hard and throbbing at the tip of my huge cock, which was long and growing erect under my palm. I told myself that over and over as I rubbed, waiting until I was moaning under my breath before reaching into my boxers with a shaking hand, trailing my fingertips through my hair before reaching between my thighs.

And the second my fingers wrapped around my small, swollen clit, the second they felt the wet folds surrounding it, the breath stopped short in my lungs. My skin instantly went cold.

I whipped my hand out of my boxers, bringing both hands to cover my face as the blood drained from between my legs, leaving my skin cold and damp instead of pulsing with warmth. I could smell myself on my fingers. 

I groaned into my palms, clutching handfuls of my hair. I didn’t know what I was thinking – that somehow, after a few drinks, and watching Molly and Greg successfully flirt, that I could kid myself into coming back to my empty cabin and making myself feel good, too. Making myself come the way I always wanted to in my dirtiest, most secret wet dreams. I blinked hard, reaching down to strip my boxers from my legs. I hurled them across the room, not even flinching when the rolled-up socks knocked my belt off its hook on the wall.

I pulled the quilt over my naked body and rolled onto my sweaty stomach and chest, pressing my cheek hard into the pillow. I felt more sober in that moment than I ever had in my entire life, clenching my eyes shut and willing myself to come back into my skin. My forty-one year old skin. My Ranger skin. My _male_ skin.

And slowly, after a long time, I started to feel once more within my solid muscle and bone. I let myself relax, unclenching my stomach and thighs. Quietly, cloaked in the dark, I began to roll my hips against the mattress underneath me the way I normally did on the nights when I needed some release. I heard voices in my head – the same disembodied men I always made up in my mind while I humped my own sheets, telling me I was good, so fucking huge, pounding them hard. I came silently a few minutes later, with my eyes closed and my hands clenched into the sheets hard enough to tear the cotton. I wanted to fall immediately asleep on my chest, even without a shower. But instead I lay on my stomach for a very long time, thinking of everything and nothing all at once.

Three days later, when I woke in the middle of the night to hear footsteps crunching outside near my cabin window, I peered through the curtain to try and see what was going on by the light of the stars. And I wasn’t surprised in the least to see Molly leading Greg by the hand back to his own cabin, giggling before gripping his coat in her hands and pushing him back against the door with a deep kiss.

And I hated that mixed in with my joy at seeing her happy, a tiny voice of jealousy whispered in her voice in the back of my mind, “ _Now we just have to find one for you._ ”

 

\--

 

Two weeks later, I had one foot up in my truck and one hand on the wheel when I heard my name being called out behind me.

“Watson!” Nick was calling as he jogged across the gravel. He was the only person who ever called everyone by their last names. I stepped down and waited.

“First of all,” he said once he reached me, leaning a hand against my truck. “Word on the radio from the first patrol this morning is a new wolf kill site down in Unit 35. Less than a mile from the Road. One of the goddamn Kantishna lodge bus drivers was stopping too close to let people get pictures– need you to go down and make sure the area’s cleared. I already radio’d it in to Backcountry on the East so they’ll close the Unit.”

I nodded. “Got it. So Adam will take the usual patrol?”

When Nick nodded, I figured the conversation was done, and started to climb up into my truck.

“Second thing,” Nick said, and his voice sounded slightly nervous. “You, uh . . . you got a passenger for today. To the kill site.”

It could only be one person for Nick to sound that hesitant, but still I asked, hoping, “Greg? One of the kids?”

A new voice suddenly sounded from over Nick’s shoulder. “The one you didn’t name,” the voice said, and Mr. Holmes came strolling into view like he wasn’t walking across unsteady gravel – dressed now in a Ranger’s uniform tailored so tightly it clung to the lines of his chest and long thighs, with the buttons of his uniform shirt open one button too low and the brimmed hat sitting just-so on top of his curls.

My heart sank down into my gut just as a forbidden pulse throbbed between my legs. I nodded at Nick that everything would be fine and settled myself up in the truck. “Get in, then,” I said so Mr. Holmes could hear me. 

Nick held up his hands in prayer, mouthing, “I owe you one,” and I wondered yet again why the entire world apparently thought that riding silently in a truck with this man was the worst possible thing.

Actually, it was the worst possible thing, for me, at least. But not for the reasons everyone else was thinking of.

I could smell his cologne when he got in the truck, effortlessly settling back into the seat and throwing his hat onto the dashboard, ruffling his curls. I held my breath against the soft rush of peppercorn and cedar.

“Thought maybe you’d gotten lost out in the backcountry,” I said as I started the engine and pulled out of the lot. “You disappeared after that first day.”

He sighed beside me. “Sadly no, although that would be agreeable to being trapped upstairs from Geoff and your head of kennels shagging each other senseless three times a week. How she’s managing to commute back and forth so much from the entrance is beyond me, and I’ve told George he’s an idiot for not just catching the damn tourist bus and traveling out to her. I don’t need his help out here every second of every day.”

To my own surprise, I laughed. “You sure don’t hide your opinions,” I said.

He looked over at me with a frown, stilling his fingers in his lap which had been aimlessly fiddling. “Normally that annoys people. Why isn’t it annoying you? Why did you laugh?”

“Well, for starters, you just called your colleague two different wrong names in one minute –”

“Irrelevant – that isn’t inherently humorous –”

“—and you also just implied you’d rather be lost out in the wilderness than hear your friend get some. Which, decent guy like Greg, you’d figure you’d be at least a little happy for him.”

He paused beside me, and for a moment I feared I had said something wrong. He was silent as we passed by a tour bus coming the opposite direction, and I did my usual wave at the bus driver while turning on my hazard’s.

Finally he sucked in a gasp and held his hands up to his lips. “ _Oh_ , of course. You and he must have bonded over dating men. I should have noticed it earlier. How tedious.”

It was my turn to suck in a breath. My chest raged at me, an alarm blaring through my gut saying, “ _get away, get away, get away._ ” An odd, unfamiliar sense of betrayal flooded my bloodstream.

I took a shaky breath. “How did –”

“No, Glen didn’t tell me, and no, it’s not obvious to anyone else in this godforsaken park just by looking at you. You look as heterosexual as they come. I see things everyone else misses.” He glanced at me quickly, some of the brazen confidence flickering in his eyes for just a moment. “Your secret is safe with me,” he said softly, and something about the way he said _”your secret_ ” sent a shiver of alarm down my spine – that he was somehow referring to more than just being gay, that he saw through me . . .that he _knew_ I had more than that one secret to tell . . .

But somehow, against everything I’d ever experienced before in my life, I trusted that he meant I was safe, no matter how many of my secrets he knew. Trusted it like I trusted my own topo maps and compass to lead me back to the Park Road after days out in the wilderness. I decided I’d try and analyze why the hell that was the case later, when I wasn’t trying not to look at the tops of his hands or smell his cologne.

I swallowed hard and tore my gaze back to the road, aware that his grey eyes were still tracing the side of my face. 

“Ok, then,” I said quietly, and he hummed and nodded and gazed out the window as if nothing had even happened, staying silent the whole rest of the two-hour trip out to thirty-five.

The stretch of Park Road near thirty-five when we got to it was a madhouse – four Kantishna tour busses parked along the road, visitors rambling through the roadside tundra with cameras in tow, a herd of caribou come over the ridge to see what the hell was going on, and far off in the distance what looked like the remains of a baby moose carcass, the wolves having long since abandoned the kill site due to the noise and crowds.

I groaned as we pulled up, pulling my hat onto my head. “Stay in the truck until I get this sorted out. Then we’ll see how close you can safely get to the site.”

He lifted his feet up onto the dashboard, performing a mock salute. “Control the masses, Ranger,” he said before bringing his fingertips to either side of his forehead and closing his eyes.

I took one last look at him and shook my head, telling myself I was just curious instead of tracing the long line of his pale throat with my eyes – the sharp curve of smooth-shaven jaw.

I paused after the door was closed, leaning back in the rolled-down window. “Don’t be one of those researchers who tries to save the fucking wolf if my gun has to get involved,” I said.

His eyes flew open and he turned his face towards me, and for a moment I thought there was a flicker of something passing through his eyes as he looked me up and down, some little hint of want or warmth, but then it was gone.

He turned back to sit straight in his seat and closed his eyes again. “Just don’t shoot anything interesting,” he said, and I let myself laugh as I walked away, trying to school my smile before I arrived at the chaotic crowd.

It took me almost an hour to get the site safe and cleared – rounding up visitors back into the busses and scolding the lodge drivers, picking up random trash and debris that had been dropped while gently shooing off a few curious caribou who were getting too close to the bus wheels. 

When the last bus finally made its way over the horizon and around the bend, disappearing into a cloud of dirt kicked up from the wheels, I looked over at the kill site off in the distance, trying to assess whether it was safe to get any closer. I reached for the binoculars in my pocket, wanting to use them to scan the area for signs of any bears.

But my eyes didn’t see tundra or distant peaks through the lenses.

Instead they saw a blur of brown curls moving quickly across the land. I tore the binoculars away from my face to see Mr. Holmes sprinting out through the brush towards the kill site, nothing in his hands except what looked like a magnifying glass and a ruler.

I cursed and chucked the binoculars back in the truck, reaching for my keys and bag before chasing off after him.

“Mr. Holmes!” I called out. He didn’t even hesitate. His long legs ate up the uneven tundra ground, leaping effortlessly through thick brush and over gnarled, dry moss.

“Mr. Holmes, wait! It isn’t safe!” I called out again, stumbling a few times as I kept my eyes on him instead of my own feet. 

When he still kept sprinting over the brush and rocks, I forced my legs to pick up speed and tried another tactic.

“I’ll shoot your goddamn leg off if you don’t fucking stop!”

That worked. Mr. Holmes stopped in his tracks, hands on his hips to try to catch his breath and staring up at the sky in frustration. When I caught up to him I could see a single bead of sweat dripping down the side of his neck.

I talked over my panting. “What the _fuck_ was that? What were you thinking?”

He looked unconcerned. “Pretty sure that’s not the appropriate language for Rangers to use with unruly visitors,” he said.

I huffed and shook my head. “’Unruly visitor’ my ass. You just sprinted towards an active kill site – there could be fucking bears coming around any of these bends – and you weren’t even making noise. Don’t even have spray!”

He rolled his eyes. “Oh, please. There are absolutely zero bears in this vicinity.”

“And you know that because you’re God?”

“I know that because I know where every bear is in this entire park – within a two-hundred -meter radius of accuracy, anyway. The nearest adult male is at least one Unit over, and the nearest adult female with cubs even farther. And obviously the wolves have given up on this kill since your ‘unruly visitors’ all came in and swarmed with their cameras. Therefore it’s perfectly safe.”

My mind raced trying to catch up with the implications of everything he just said. “It’s impossible to know where every bear is in this park. Barely any of them are officially tracked –”

“What exactly do you think I’ve been doing during these past weeks since we arrived? Enjoying the interior of my cabin? It’s simple. It’s arithmetic. The tracked bears exhibit patterns, therefore the other bears will also exhibit patterns – take into consideration the weather, their breeding habits, the estimated population, other animal migrations, food availability, visitor influence, etcetera and you can reasonably predict where every bear currently is. And if you’re not an idiot, you’ll have a topographic map of the park memorized and mentally accessible so you can keep track and update accordingly in real time.”

It sounded like such a load of shit – so godforsakenly impossible that I couldn’t even begin to explain to him all the reasons he was insane. Then I remembered Molly’s words from Dan, “ _Genius, best in the world._ ”

And why the NPS spent money to fly his team over from Europe started to make a lot more sense.

I crossed my arms and looked over at him, momentarily stunned at the outline of the curve of his back against the purple Denali peaks behind him. “If all that’s true, that’s fucking amazing,” I said. “But it sounds like a load of shit.”

He lifted his chin a bit, reaching up to wipe his forehead with the back of his hand. “Then I’ll prove it to you over the summer,” he said matter-of-factly.

“You better,” I answered, my voice unexpectedly rough and low. I saw his eyes widen, thought I imagined a shiver pass over his forearms, and then he was clearing his throat, gesturing back to the kill site about one-hundred feet away. 

“Now, after you, Ranger,” he said, dramatically bowing.

I rolled my eyes, glancing once across the landscape before re-checking my bear spray and gun clipped to my belt. I started walking, not missing the satisfied smile that passed over his face.

“I could get you in a lot of shit for this,” I said. “Blatantly disregarding what’s practically the number one park safety rule – listen to the Rangers.”

He chuckled, a deep sound that rumbled in my own chest. “Well,” he said casually as we walked side by side. “When you do, I might happen to mention how you threatened to shoot off my leg.”

I laughed, such a free and natural sound I felt it like physical warmth in my throat, and when he laughed along with me, and our eyes locked for one second too long before I looked away, I thought that maybe being stuck in silent car rides with Sherlock Holmes was a burden I wouldn’t mind being saddled with again.

He studied the kill site for nearly two hours, getting on his hands and knees with his magnifying glass, taking measurements with the ruler, and, to the sound of my protests, tasting pieces of grass and clumps of dirt.

I stood back and watched him, pretending I was mostly scanning the horizon for any wildlife while my eyes kept straying to the curve of his back and shoulders under the tan uniform shirt.

“You’re not gonna write any of this down?” I asked him at one point.

His only answer was pointing to his forehead as he looked closer at a faded pawprint in the moss.

Just when the sun was starting to dip behind the distant peaks, pouring down their snowy slopes with orange and gold, I cleared my throat, pushing off from the nearby rock I’d been leaning against.

“Should get back, Mr. Holmes,” I said.

To my surprise, he straightened up immediately from his crouch without protest, brushing the dirt from the knees of his pants and wiping dust from his brow with his forearm. “Sherlock,” he said simply as he started walking the half-mile back towards the Road, not pausing for me to catch up or even looking back over his shoulder.

“Sherlock,” I tried out under my breath, even though he couldn’t hear me from where he was already scrambling across a stretch of river rock.

We walked back to the truck in silence – one I never once felt the need to fill. I tossed him a canteen of water when we were seated back in the truck, and he caught it like we’d been doing the same routine for years, taking long, slow gulps before handing it back to me without a word.

When we were halfway back to Toklat, Sherlock reached into the pocket of his shirt and drew out a pack of cigarettes, twirling it once in his fingers before reaching to flip open the lid.

“No fucking way,” I said, giving him a hard look. “Don’t tell me you’re about to try to smoke in a _National Park_.”

He rolled his eyes and continued to flick open the lid, reaching in and lifting out a stick of gum with two long fingers.

“Happy now?” he said sarcastically. “Not going to shoot my leg off?”

I huffed and shook my head out at the darkening road, keeping my eye on the hairpin turns. “You trying to quit so you keep it in the carton to trick yourself? Seems a bit beneath your intellect.”

“I’m not trying to quit,” he said, sounding offended as he popped the stick of nicotine gum into his mouth. “But I know I’ll get murdered if I try to light up in a place like this. I keep them in the carton so Giles doesn’t steal any. _He’s_ the one trying to quit. Probably some misguided attempt to further win your kennel girl’s affections.”

I heard myself chuckling. “For such a genius you sure have a hard time remembering a handful of names. What do you think my name even is – just Ranger?”

He looked over at me, waiting until I glanced to my side to meet his gaze. “I know your name,” he said, in a tone of voice that felt like I’d been waiting a hundred years just to hear it.

I shivered against my will, trying not to squirm in the seat as I felt an embarrassing pulse between my thighs, warm between my hips. “You’ll have to prove it to me,” I said just as the sunset lit up the sky.

He put his foot up on the dashboard, looking out his window at the tundra below. “You have yourself a deal, Ranger,” he said softly, and I met his gaze for a moment in the window reflection before forcing myself to look back at the winding dirt road.

That time, when we got back to Toklat, he didn’t dash off wordlessly from the truck after we parked. Instead he walked over and casually hefted the hose over his shoulder, starting to spray down the truck before I’d even gotten down from the driver’s seat.

“How do you even know what you’re doing?” I said, watching him from a distance so I wouldn’t get wet.

He walked around to get the other side. “I watched you do it last time. Isn’t rocket science.”

“You didn’t even stick around last time,” I said before I could stop myself. “You just dashed off.”

I thought I caught the hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth. I waited for an answer – for _something_ \- as he finished with the hose and splashed a handful of leftover water over his face and hair. Some droplets dripped down his long neck, pooling in the dip of his collarbone. I licked my lips behind his back.

He plopped his hat back over his curls. “Consider it my apology for being so rude then,” he said, with an odd look in his eyes. He nodded once, “Ranger,” before turning to walk casually up the slope towards his cabin, immediately disappearing into the shade of the mist and trees.

I stood there for a long time staring in the direction where he walked, long after I could no longer see his curls bobbing through the trees. Long after I couldn’t hear his feet crunching through the dirt.

And then, before I could stop myself, I shook my head and leaped back up into still-dripping truck, tearing out of the gravel so quickly I nearly skidded into the shrubs. The next day was my day off; I didn’t need to be anywhere early. I turned left onto the Road, heading east without looking back.

Lugnut would be waiting for me, and I had a few new things I needed to tell him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Your kind comments are my bread and wine - my milk and honey. Lugnut appreciates your comments. He adores them. And so do I. Your grace and kindness and enthusiasm are all so greatly appreciated!
> 
> Enjoy, let me know if you have any questions, and thanks so much for reading :)
> 
> *** Quick Answers to some questions I've gotten: 'Mobile' referred to a snowmobile. This fic *will* jump back and forth between 1991 and 1992, so don't worry if you were confused last chapter - answers are coming. There *will* be animal death, hence the tag. I'm not being subtle about it (sad sad sad I know) but I promise I will give ample warnings! And there will be an ultimate happy ending!


	5. May 1992

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm changing up the music recs a bit! Seeing as how I'm completely head over heels obsessed with my queen Sarah Jarosz, each chapter will now have one Bluegrass and one Sarah Jarosz song. I think you'll thank me. She's a goddess.
> 
> Bluegrass: Listen to Tim O'Brien sing "You Were on My Mind" [HERE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jL3fycVjfk/).  
> (Thank you so much to hotshoeagain on tumblr for reminding me that song existed!)
> 
> Queen Sarah: Listen to "Back of my Mind" (and swoon over it) [HERE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQjo4C-FdSM/).
> 
> Enjoy!

May 1992

For two weeks I avoided camp around Toklat like the plague.

During the day, if I wasn’t out on patrols or picking up extra shifts, I was setting off down the Road with the windows rolled down, needing to be anywhere other than a cabin just fifty feet from his. I stayed far away from the places in the park where we’d visited last summer – old wolf kill sites and migration routes he’d dragged me to near Savage River and Igloo Creek, and day hikes I’d made him go on with me in return up around Polychrome and Mount Galen.

Instead I went to parts of the park I hadn’t been to in years – parts I had seen once and then promptly forgotten, and parts that had remained a speck on a map until then. Each day, when my shift ended, I simply walked off the Road, out across the tundra and down bushy drainage, climbing up steep hills and craggy mountains to see the valleys and hidden little pools behind them. My boots grew worn and grey after just a few days, and my muscles burned and ached – blisters covering my toes.

I had expected it all to make me feel young again – the John I’d been before Sherlock Holmes ever stepped up into my truck. I could get it all out of my system and remember who I was – a Ranger and a homesteader, employee and a friend. Forget that I had ever in my life been called someone’s lover.

But instead I ended each day sagging with exhaustion, crawling into my bed only when I couldn’t take another step. I’d stare at my ceiling with dry eyes through the long night, trying to think of Lugnut or Molly or Talkeetna, and hating myself for wanting to get up and leave. To sneak into his cabin and crawl between his sheets – tell him that I didn’t give a shit about what happened if only he held me for just one more night. 

And each morning, when I woke up still spent and sore, I told myself that maybe the next hike, or the next one, would make me feel young and content to stay in my own bed.

So I kept hiking.

I came across some backcountry hikers one day, lost and frazzled and desperate to find the Road – so grateful to run into a Ranger that the young woman burst into tears and pulled me into a hug. Another day saw me accidentally startling a grazing moose, something that hadn’t happened to me since way back in my first season. It had happened just ten feet from my bunk at C-Camp, and I’d been too caught off guard to start running in a zig zag like I was supposed to do, and was saved by one of the bus drivers coming back from eating dinner, shaking his head at me afterwards like I was the biggest idiot he’d ever seen.

I encountered grizzlies twice – once a mom and cubs a little too close for comfort, making me have to grip my spray in my hand while I raised my arms and called out Molly’s preferred line of, “I’m human! If you eat me I’ll just taste like the chemicals in our food!”

And then, two weeks into my new hiking regimen, everything came to a halt. 

I was heading back towards my truck by some smaller lakes a few miles east of Wonder. The mountains were sighing around me, settling down for a soft night of sleep. My feet and legs were aching, begging to be done for the day and crawl into bed. I heard a twig snap up a slope to my right, and I looked up expecting to see a moose or a bear, hand already reaching for the spray on my belt.

But then a huge herd of caribou came ambling over the nearest hill, spilling into the twilight valley like marbles pouring down smooth, green silk. I stopped and lost my breath, willing myself to disappear into the bushes at my back so they wouldn’t be bothered by me and change their course.

The entire earth was softened, silent and cradling the caribou as they made their slow way across the glittering tundra, as if all of us were suspended in the smooth ball of water at the tip of a velvet flower petal – the horsetail and violets that Molly tried to grow in her little garden each summer. I watched them for a long time, moving in pairs to nibble at the moss while the young ones chased each other and jumped off the rocks.

And I thought of watching an almost identical scene last summer – the memory hitting me so sharply in my chest I had to bend over with my hands on my knees. There had been a warm body beside mine, and fingertips hesitantly brushing against my own, and a voice saying, “ _You know, Ranger, you’re the only person I’ve ever met in my life whose presence doesn’t bore me to tears, and despite all of my research, I can’t for the life of me figure out_ why.”

I blinked hard and immediately started running back to my truck, accidentally startling a few of the caribou as I moved. I closed the door and sat with my hands on the steering wheel for a very long time, willing my heartbeat to slow down so I could take in full breaths of air, and for my fingertips to stop reaching out to hold an invisible hand.

And suddenly I was keenly, _achingly_ aware that I couldn’t continue the whole season living that way – that eventually I would have to see him again, or speak to him like normal. That one day I would have to hear him say “John,” or “Ranger,” and not close my eyes tightly at the sound, or hunch over at the thrum of physical pain in my chest.

That I couldn’t just make myself disappear into the land. 

And so, fifteen days after Sherlock Holmes snuck up behind me on the river rock just before sunrise, I stood over the little kitchen sink of my cabin in the dim light of the flickering lamp, hours before I would normally wake up for a usual morning shift. My bare feet on the wooden floor were covered in wraps over my blisters, and I could feel my sweatpants barely clinging on to my hips and thighs – thinner now after so much exercise and not enough food or sleep. 

A pot of boiled water sat ready on the stove. I hung the little mirror I kept for shaving on the handle of one of the kitchen cabinets. Then I stood deathly still and held the razor in my hand, convincing myself to get on with it and begin.

The beard reminded me of him.

How I used to wake up some mornings in a tent or in my bedroom to his fingertips stroking across my bristly cheek. How he would run his palm softly across the hairs on my face, stroking my jaw when he brought his lips to mine. How it would leave burns on him, bright pink marks streaked across the inside of his thighs and over his ribs, reminding me that I had touched him there and kissed his bare skin.

It took me over an hour to shave it all off. Each stroke of the razor felt like a wisp of goodbye – cutting off the ghosts of his fingertips that had still clung to my face all winter. Slicing away the memories of his eyes on my bare chest.

He had shaved me, once. Shaved me in my cabin kitchen in the exact place I stood in that moment, pleased with himself and grinning as he leaned forward to press his lips to each new section of smooth, shaved skin.

He’d held my face in his hands for a long moment after he was done, and finally looked straight into my eyes and said, “ _You look handsome_.”

And I’d wanted to tell him, sitting there looking straight up into his face, how nobody had ever told me that in all the long decades of my life. How when I was eight years old my mom had put a bow in my hair before the church picnic and told me I looked beautiful, and how I’d gotten a slap that left a red palmprint on my cheek for the whole morning when I’d asked her why she didn’t call me handsome instead.

But I hadn’t told him any of that, and I knew then that I never would. 

When I finished my shave, I cleaned the razor and dumped out the water, meaning to take down the small mirror and get on with my new day. Instead I found myself looking at my face in the mirror, tracing the dark bags under my eyes and lines around my mouth. Shame burned hotly in my throat when I saw how my cheeks had sunken over the past weeks, bringing out the too-delicate lines of my too-small face like old horrific ghosts appearing slowly through the mist.

It was moments like that when I wondered how no one had ever guessed. 

I leaned against my hands on the cold kitchen countertop, staring at my face for a long time in the blurry mirror. I saw my twenty-year-old self as if nothing had changed, wearing baseball caps pulled down too low and a strip of cotton wrapped painfully tight around my chest. When I was working on the cattle ranch just south of Badlands, where I’d showed up on the first day of the season for work with everything I owned slung across my back. Where I’d said my name was John for the first time to another soul, and nobody had given a damn to ask anything other than whether I wanted to be paid on the first day of the month or the fifteenth. And every cent I earned that summer went straight into a backpack that wound up on a plane headed all the way to New York City. And later that year, on the first day I was handed a Ranger’s uniform, the nametag attached to the brand new jacket said “John Watson.” I’d waited until all the other new employees had already changed and gone, and then I’d winced as the tan shirt pressed against the bandages still covering my tender new chest.

And that person was looking back at me in the mirror as if two decades hadn’t passed.

I’d wanted to tell Sherlock about that person, one night especially lying side by side and fully-clothed in a tent perched on top of the Muldrow Glacier, with the wind battling against the thin sides and moaning over our breaths. I’d wanted to tell him about the last time that person ever saw the backs of his parents, or the first time that person whispered the name ‘John’ under the blankets in the middle of the night on the day he turned sixteen, wanting to try out the feel of it on his lips.

But we hadn’t talked about those things. We never did, really. And instead Sherlock had turned onto his back, yanked off his jeans and gripped me hard between my legs. He’d moaned and whispered, “ _Do it, John. Come on, come on and fuck me,_ ” and I’d kissed his mouth and fucked him what felt like hundreds of years ago.

I splashed a handful of ice cold water over my newly smooth face and breathed warmth into a towel, coming back to myself. When I got dressed into my uniform in the half-dark, I did it slowly, reverently, like I’d done that very first time. I adjusted the collar and pins on my shirt with care. And after I reached down to fit the bulge into the pocket in my boxers, I stood there in my bedroom and placed my hand between my legs, holding it through my pants and waiting until I couldn’t tell the difference between socks and real skin.

I took time for it all – packing my cheese sandwich and jerky for later that day, holstering my gun, slipping on my worn boots. When I opened my cabin door to head down for my shift, I held my head high, not looking down at my feet on the ground as I walked. It was the first time in two weeks I hadn’t snuck out to my truck before the sun had risen.

I saw him almost immediately. 

He was coming out of the shower house, curls still wet and clinging to his neck, and with the towel wrapped around his shoulders over his damp clothes. He stopped in his tracks, eyes fixed on the side of my face as I moved through the trees towards the parking lot.

I thought I would keep walking – show him I had moved on, and was living my normal life, and that this was my home. That he could come back any time he liked and not affect my life at all. Make him think that I didn’t wake up in the night and still reach for him beside me – even in tiny cabins at the bottom of the goddamn Grand Canyon.

But I slowed down, then stopped. And I turned to look at him.

It hurt.

All the air sucked out of my lungs in a painful rush. My fingers twitched. I wanted to change course in the gravel and run towards him instead, touch his warm body with my own hands to prove to myself that he was real, that he was really there, in _Denali_.

I stayed put where I was. I caught his gaze, piercing me through the trees like the first time I ever saw the Northern Lights above the peaks. He looked older, decades older, than the man who had jumped into my truck in a tailored suit just over a year ago. He was standing there, staring at me with his mouth hanging half open. His eyes were soft and afraid, and I lied to myself that I also saw in them something like yearning.

He opened his mouth, starting to speak, “John, are you –”

I put up my hand to stop him, breathing hard through my nose. “Not now,” I said softly. I looked at him for another moment before forcing myself to keep walking down the path towards the parking lot. 

I didn’t realize until I was already ten feet away that, “ _not now_ ” also meant, “ _one day, eventually._ ” And I felt his gaze burning into my back the whole way down to my truck.

 

\--

 

Next chance I got to see Lugnut I sat with him by his hut. He looked too exhausted to go for much of a walk. The snow had melted from the kennel yard, leaving parts of the ground finally dry. I let him sit between my legs and lean back against my chest. He stretched up his head so I would scratch the full length of his neck. My lips brushed against his snout when I whispered to him.

“He’s back, old man,” I murmured, curling my fingers through his thick grey fur. “Don’t know what the hell he’s up to, but he’s back.”

Lugnut turned his head and looked straight into my eyes, leaning his face to the side as he watched my lips move – that way he always did that had me convinced he could understand me.

“Thought I’d never see him again,” I went on, letting my voice get raspy since only Lugnut was there to hear me. “After that trip out in Unit 8 . . . well, I told you about that before, didn’t I? I bet you remember every word.” I scratched between his ears, and he closed his eyes with a happy growl. “But then he just turned up here a few weeks ago. Walked up behind me at Toklat like nothing even happened.” I swallowed hard. “And I couldn’t even look at him, old boy. I can’t just . . . I need to move on, now. I thought I _had_ moved on. Isn’t that what you told me to do?”

Lugnut wiggled in my arms, bumping his head against my hand so I would continue scratching his ears. I did, leaning down to kiss into his fur.

“He looks so much older,” I said, remembering the sad lines of his eyes from the other morning by the shower house – the way he hadn’t been floating effortlessly across the uneven gravel. Hadn’t had some witty, sarcastic thing to say, or been twiddling energetically with his hands. “More . . . soft. Not all sharp edges. And he’s too thin.”

Lugnut pawed at me and whimpered. I laughed under my breath. “You saying I look the same?” I asked.

When Lugnut leaned back against me, I slowly closed my eyes. For one brief flash I saw my own life like a movie – me and Sherlock last summer starting off on our first backpacking trip out near Turtle Mountain, running after each other like we were twenty years old and laughing as we whacked through the brush and scrambled up scree. The way he smiled - his private smile he saved just for me - when I caught him in my arms and kissed him just after we crossed one of the small forks of the river, icy water still dripping from our wet calves and thighs. Just the two of us alone in the world.

And then, like a nightmare pouring black over the golden memory, I saw the look on his face from a few months later, just before I turned my back and walked away for good – the shattered eyes and pale face I left behind me on the mountain.

I sighed and held Lugnut back against my chest, gently patting his side. “I probably look older now, too,” I said.

And as I pressed my cheek against his face and breathed in the scent of his fur, I finally said words I’d been denying myself all winter. They felt heavy in my mouth. “I miss him, old Lug,” I whispered. “He’s right here in the same park, and I still miss him so fucking much.”

He licked away the single tear at the corner of my eye, wagging his tail at the taste of the salt.

Later that night I paid Molly a visit, waving off her offer again to spend the night on her couch. After dinner an odd silence settled over us at her table – one more uncomfortable than I’d ever felt around her before.

Finally, she spoke. “I didn’t know,” she said quietly.

I frowned, heart starting to speed up in my chest. “Know what?”

She looked at me with big, sad eyes. “When Greg said he was coming back for half this season to continue the project, he never mentioned . . . he didn’t tell me that Sherlock was coming back, too – that he would be here the whole summer. I would have told you.”

The entire earth felt deadly silent after she said his name, her voice too sharp and loud in the small space of her warm cabin.

I ducked my head. “Wouldn’t have blamed you if you had known,” I finally said. “If I were you I wouldn’t have known how to tell me.”

Silence fell again between us, thick and heavy and impenetrable as Molly fiddled with the ends of her long hair. I could practically hear her mind whirring as she softly frowned and chewed her lip.

“Word is you’ve been hiking up a storm,” she said. “Thought you’d decided just to go off and live with the bears – scoping out the best sleeping spots.”

Her joke fell flat – I couldn’t bring myself to smile. I shrugged. “Just . . . needed to get out a bit more, I guess.”

She tried to hold my gaze. “You look . . .” she paused, then a grin twitched at the corner of her mouth. “Honestly, you look like shit,” she finally said.

I laughed, stroking my smooth cheek forgetting my beard wasn’t there anymore. “Honestly, kid, I feel a bit like shit,” I said back. 

She leaned forward, and I felt the air in the room change and shift, buzzing at the tip of her tongue which was dyed deep purple from the early blackberries she’d brought back as a treat from Fairbanks. 

“John,” she said. Every muscle in my body tensed. “Can I ask you something?”

I suddenly felt that everything was about to be ruined. It was the question I’d been dreading for twenty long years. The question that I heard in my nightmares, dreams where I was paraded stripped naked in front of crowds of people, and everyone pointed between my legs.

My tongue was numb. “Yes,” I made myself say.

She looked down at her folded hands for the longest minute of my life. “I don’t know how to ask you this without sounding blunt,” she said.

My blood was roaring. I couldn’t bring myself to speak, so I just nodded, clenching my hands in the fabric of my jeans.

When she looked back up at me, her eyes were big and clear. “John,” she said seriously. “Are you gay?”

I nearly laughed out loud in relief. I felt my muscles explode with the release of sharp tension, and my hands started to shake where I pressed them into my thighs. 

I hoped I wasn’t actually smiling. I leaned forward across the table to match her own pose. I cleared my throat. “I am.”

She nodded and licked her lips. “So everything with Sherlock . . . the time you spent together –”

“We weren’t just friends.”

She nodded again. “And whatever happened at the end of the summer – that last trip you mentioned right before you left for the Canyon –”

I forced myself to keep looking at her. “Wasn’t just a falling out,” I said.

Suddenly she reached out and placed her hand on top of mine, her palm warming my fingers against the wood of the kitchen table. I turned my hand upwards to catch her fingers in mine.

Something clicked in my mind. “Greg never told you?” I asked.

She shook her head, and I was surprised that there wasn’t any hurt or anger in her eyes. “I never asked him,” she said. “Didn’t even realize he knew.” She frowned. “Does that mean . . . are you . . . out?”

That time I did laugh. “God, no,” I said, holding her hand in both of mine. “Greg’s the only one who ever knew. He just happened to –” I stopped mid-word, realizing I didn’t know whether Molly knew he’d been with men. 

She squeezed my fingers. “I know about him.”

I hummed. “Yeah, well . . . he sort of . . guessed, and I confirmed. Something I said to him the night he first asked me if I was with you.”

“The campfire?”

“The campfire.”

Suddenly she smiled, lighting up the room now that the fire had grown low. “I’ve been really stupid, then, haven’t I?”

I shook my head no, feeling ashamed even though I couldn’t pinpoint why. “Not stupid at all, kid. I’ve just had your whole lifetime’s worth of practice at hiding it.”

The smile fell quickly from her face. “So . . .” she bit her lip. “All this time . . you’ve never –”

My throat felt tight. “Only with him.”

Her face looked unbearably sad. I wanted to reach out and wipe away the lines between her brows with my thumb. She gripped my hands harder. “I just want you to be happy,” she whispered, and her voice was rough.

I swallowed hard. “I am happy, Molls.” I tried to smile. “Got my dream job.” I winked at her. “My dream girl.”

She laughed through her nose, rolling her eyes. “That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”

I pulled my hands away back into my lap and looked down at the table. “I know.”

And I didn’t know how to tell her that the reason I hadn’t shared a bed with another man in the twenty long years before Sherlock Holmes wasn’t because of all the reasons probably running through her head. I didn’t know how to tell her, sitting there beautiful and soft in her safe little kitchen, that the reason I’d never tried was because I didn’t want the shit to get kicked out of me the moment the other guy reached down my pants and felt a rolled-up sock. Didn’t want to ruin the warm, clean air of her world by telling her that the precious few times I’d ever allowed myself to be with someone I’d only given them a blow job and then walked away alone.

Because then she’d understand that Sherlock Holmes wasn’t just some ex to avoid at work. She’d see that he had been my . . . that he had been _everything_ \- an everything which I’d thrown away.

And I knew that she would be sadder for me than I was even sad for myself.

I cleared my throat, not knowing how long I’d sat there just staring down at my hands. I suddenly ached for the comfort of my beard on my face – something to soften the lines of my mouth and make me feel less bare and exposed.

I looked up at her, waiting patiently and leaning back in her chair. “Are you angry I never told you before?” I asked, unsure if I actually wanted to hear her answer.

She gave me a hard look. “Now you’re being the idiot.”

I laughed, leaning back in my chair as well with a sigh. “Right, then, not angry.”

“Definitely not angry.”

An hour later, after coffee and some of Molly’s homemade pie to ease the thick emotions still hanging about in the air, Molly turned to me in her kitchen where I was washing her dishes in the sink.

“Should I tell you a secret now, then?” she asked.

I raised my eyebrow at her, still scrubbing the plate in my hands. “Gonna finally admit you’ve been desperately in love with me all these years?”

She threw the dish towel at my head. “You’re impossible. It’s something I want to tell Greg, actually,” she went on. I could feel her fidgeting by my side at the counter. “Something I’m gonna tell him when he moves back out here in a few weeks.”

I paused and turned to her, up to my forearms in soapy water. “Well?”

Her eyes lit up the way fresh snowfall reflected the sun – the fields of purple and gold wildflowers dotting the tundra like a rich quilt.

“I’m pregnant,” she said.

I froze, blinking hard at her shining face. “And you’re . . . and you want –”

Her eyes were wet. “More than anything.” 

Emotion ripped through me like a wave, from my throat to my toes. “Fuck, kid,” I said with a rough voice. “Fuck, that’s –” I held up my hands, still dripping wet. “Come here.”

The hug she gave me was the fiercest one of my entire life, and it lasted until long after the water in the sink had gone cold.

And I didn’t think of Sherlock Holmes for another second that night.

And it wasn’t until hours later, all the way back in my own bed, that I remembered how my mom had once held my chin hard between her fingers, the day we found out my eighteen-year-old older sister was due to have twins at the clinic three towns over.

“One day you’re gonna be the one gets pregnant,” she’d said to me. “And you better hope to God you’ve got a ring on your finger before you’re ready to push ‘em out, or I swear to you, you’ll be no daughter of mine.”

 

\--

 

Nick was grinning when he jogged up to me outside Eielson, weaving his way through a group of visitors waiting for the next bus. I’d been spending my lunch hour catching up with one of the bus dispatchers – young guy named Aaron who knew some of my old coworkers from Canyonlands. The sky was thick and overcast, threatening rain.

“Watson!” Nick called out. I waved to him and moved closer, stopping twice to assure visitors who spotted my uniform that yes, the bus really was coming, and no, I couldn’t radio the driver to tell him to speed up.

“Alright, Nick?” I asked when we moved to stand over on one of the built-in lookout balconies.

Nick squinted up at the rainclouds. “Jesus, Watson, it’s harder than finding a needle in a haystack to get a hold of you these days,” he said, still smiling. “What – you just up and remembered a few weeks ago that you could hike?”

I laughed, rubbing the back of my neck. “Something like that.”

Nick reached up to scratch his beard. “Well, way you’ve been saving our asses taking on these extra shifts lately, I can’t say I’m complaining. Put in a good word for you, actually. Up with the offices.”

I smiled, even though a promotion up to GS-11 was the absolute last thing I’d ever wanted. “Appreciate that, Nick,” I said.

He waved me off and nodded, then clapped his hands together. “Right, then, got some good news for ya!” he said. “My little way of trying to repay you for working your ass off this season – and the ten seasons before it.”

I laughed and crossed my arms over my chest, uncomfortable and wary. “Alright then?”

He smiled a deep, warm smile and reached forward to put his hand on my shoulder. “Know your old pal is back with us this season,” he said.

My face paled. I hoped the panic didn’t show on my face. “You mean Mr. Holmes?” I asked, keeping my voice steady.

Nick threw back his head and laughed, speaking out to an invisible audience. “’Mr. Holmes’ he says like you two weren’t peas in a pod all last summer.”

I gave a weak smile, hoping he would get on with whatever horrifying thing he was clearly about to say.

Nick took a deep breath. “Actually, I’ll tell ya I was still pretty shocked when he called me over the winter. ‘Second season?’ I said to him. ‘NPS hadn’t planned on having y’all out here for more than one season.’ And he said – well first he asked me if you were coming back from the Canyon, which I told him we were crossing our fingers that you were. And then, you know what he told me – he said he’d come back out even without the NPS money. Do it through his own grants or pro-bono just to pick up the research project where they left off. Run it for a second year and do more tracking. ‘I’d do anything to get back to Denali’ he told me on the phone. ‘Got some unfinished business there’ – you know, meaning the wolves. Thought I’d hit my head and gone to heaven,” he finished, face bright and shining.

I wanted to run away and be alone and vomit. I hadn’t known any of that – hadn’t known that it was his idea, that he had called Nick, that he had _begged_.

I thought of the flash of longing I’d seen on his face outside the shower house, and a mix of anger and guilt and shame churned hotly in my gut.

“Yeah,” I finally said, taking off my hat to run a hand through my hair. “Yeah, he’s, uh. . . he’s really something. The way he gets devoted to a project.”

Nick laughed again. “You’re an odd one, Watson,” he said with a grin, as if we’d been drinking and fishing buddies for years. “So, the good news I promised you.”

He stopped to clear his throat, and my heart hammered in my chest.

“The way I see it, you and him have barely had time to stand on the same patch of dirt since you both got here,” he went on. “So I went ahead and changed around your shifts for the next few weeks. Gonna be his research partner, just like you were most of last season. You know, take him around in your truck and out on hikes like you did before. Aaron and Jeff have agreed to cover your normal patrols – it’s all set to go.”

My hands were shaking, and my spine felt like it would up and snap. I barely got out words. “And Sherlock agreed to this?” I asked.

Nick leaned his head to the side. “Oh, he went on and on about not wanting to bother you during your work, and how he’d be fine out on his own, and a load of other bull. But don’t you lie to me for one second and tell me the both of you weren’t hoping for a repeat of last season. Consider it my way of saying ‘job well done,’ Watson.” He finished and winked at me, standing back with his hands on his hips and probably waiting for me to sink to my knees and thank him, or give him applause.

Instead I closed my eyes for just a second longer than a normal blink, taking a deep breath to keep myself from screaming into Nick’s face that I lived in the bottom of the fucking Grand Canyon for six months just to escape Sherlock Holmes, and now he’s putting me two goddamn feet away from him in the front seat of a truck, where his cologne will suffocate every breath I try to take with soft cedar.

I schooled my face as best I could and wiped my hand over my mouth. “Gee, Nick. I, uh . . . I don’t know what to say.”

Nick rolled his eyes and huffed a laugh, already starting to walk away. “You can thank me later, Watson. God knows I wasn’t expecting a bouquet of flowers or anything.” He spoke over his shoulder. “New schedule’s taped to your cabin door – at least Hannah said she would do it. Don’t have too much fun.”

I stood frozen as he walked away, immediately getting into an animated conversation with another group of visitors about the types of food bears eat.

The world felt blurry – moving in slow motion through a haze. I walked back towards the small paved parking lot to my truck, forcing myself not to think of anything but each foot stepping in front of the other. The whole drive back to Toklat, I kept my mind clear and blank, focusing on each curve of the road and then the curve after that.

A fierce, deep part of me just wanted to keep driving – drive all the way East and bury my face between Lugnut’s ears. Then put him in my truck passenger seat and drive down Highway 3 towards Talkeetna, never once looking up in the rearview mirror at the Alaska Range. 

Instead I pulled off at Toklat, keeping my head low as I walked quickly up to my cabin after washing the truck and refilling the gas. A piece of paper was pinned to my door, “ _Keep our favorite Brit safe! XO, Hannah_ ” written in a loopy scrawl across the front.

I opened it with surprisingly steady hands, mind still blank.

It said that I was meeting Sherlock to drive him out near Stony the next morning at seven.

Suddenly I crumpled the paper in my hand. My stomach rose up into my throat. “Fuck,” I whispered. I leaned forward to bang my forehead against the rough wood of the door.

He had said “fuck,” once – had said it many times. Said it underneath me when he was on his back, his fingers clutching hard at my worn, thin sheets. Said it on that backpacking trip last summer, when I leaned forward for the very first time and dragged my lips and beard along his jaw, whispering his name into his skin like a warm secret.

Said it under his breath with hot tears in his eyes, right after I turned around and started walking away. Right before he said I had it all wrong, and that he didn’t mean it. 

Right before he begged me to stay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Admission time: in case you haven't noticed by now, I have such a RAGING CRUSH on Ranger Watson.
> 
> Your comments mean so damn much to me. They make me smile like a lunatic and want to get on a plane straight back to Denali. I am so, so grateful for all of you who have taken time to send me kind words, or rec this fic to others, or send me your genius music recs!
> 
> I'm truly BLOWN AWAY by the positive feedback to this fic so far! I love sharing this landscape and these characters with you all. Next update coming soon: we journey back to 1991 and watch our flirting lovebirds get closer. . .
> 
> Oh, and Lugnut says hi.


	6. May - June 1991

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bluegrass: Listen to Rodney Crowell and Emmylou Harris sing "Traveling Kind" [HERE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T65y-TtsSzM/).
> 
> Queen Sarah Jarosz: listen to "I Can't Love You Now" [HERE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcX5ZEIAE2Q/).
> 
> Note: Remember that animal death tag? It comes up once in this chapter. It has NOTHING to do with Lugnut in this chapter, but there is a dead animal from a distance which Sherlock and John come across.
> 
> Enjoy :)

May - June 1991

Before I even realized what was happening, it became our new routine.

Suddenly, after twenty years working park patrols on my own, lost in my own head as I scanned each new horizon, I found myself with a passenger in my truck five days a week. We never really planned it – he never officially asked, and I certainly didn’t invite him. But every morning, when I came out from my cabin with my bag slung over my shoulder and coffee in hand, Sherlock Holmes was waiting for me leaning against the nearest tree. He’d wait until I reached him before uncrossing his arms and giving a nod. 

“Ranger,” he always said in greeting as he started walking casually by my side.

“Don’t have anything better to do today?” I always asked him. He’d smirk as he reached over and stole my Stanley out of my hand, taking two long gulps of my coffee before wiping the back of his hand across his mouth with a wince.

“Christ, that’s revolting,” he said to me every single morning. And every single morning I said back, “Then bring your own.”

He would sit patiently through all my patrols, never complaining about wherever we had to go when I was radio’d – waiting in the truck sometimes for hours while I dealt with whatever situation came up. Some days he told me a little more about his research – wolf packs he’d tracked in other parks around Europe, or he’d go on for an hour straight just about one particular plant. I never said anything, and when he didn’t speak, it was silence. A silence that felt as natural as the gravel crunching under the tires, keeping me company so I wouldn’t get lost off in my own head.

And the second I was off the clock, or the second my radio went silent, it’s like a flip would switch on in his brain. He would come alive, muttering under his breath and directing me exactly where to go before he would hop out of the truck before it had even finished moving and dash off into the trees, searching out an invisible pile of wolf scat or a pawprint, whispering at me to shut up when I called out to slow down so he could focus on retaining all of his research in his own damn head.

Only three days in to this odd new arrangement, I pulled over to wait for a passing bus and turned towards Sherlock in the front seat. He was sitting in a great ball with his feet up on the dashboard, leaning his head back into the headrest in a way that made his slowly tanning neck look a whole mile long. I hated how my heart missed a beat in my chest as I took half a second to watch his grey eyes lazily gaze out over the hills.

“What are you even getting out of this?” I suddenly asked him. He hummed and looked over at me, and I swallowed hard over a dry throat, holding my breath so I wouldn’t have to smell his soft cologne, mixed with a day’s worth of light sweat and dirt.

“I’m being driven,” he said simply, looking at me like I was an idiot.

I rolled my eyes. “Right, but you could get literally anyone else to drive you. Someone who could take you where you actually want to go all day so you’re not wasting hours sitting waiting in a truck.” When he stayed silent, I looked straight at him. “You could hop on literally any bus driving the Road. You could drive your own self, even. I know that Nick would hand over the keys to one of the vans for your team to use – don’t tell me Greg, Max and Babs aren’t doing their own field research, too.”

He sat back and looked straight ahead out at the road, flinging his hand out towards the view. “I’m simply enjoying an opportunity to view the scenery – seeing the sights,” he said, oddly as if he’d never uttered that phrase before in his life.

I laughed. “Oh, so those first few weeks you spent holed up in your cabin with your maps and your graphs – when everyone said you were learning every inch of the park, that was just practice for sitting around half the day in a beat-up truck?”

He crossed his arms over his chest and gave a single laugh. “This your way of telling me I’ve outstayed my welcome?”

And suddenly the prospect of my passenger seat being empty, even though it had only been three days of him filling it, pulled like a sharp ache at the base of my chest.

“No,” I said too loudly, too quickly after his question. 

He looked over at me and blinked once, holding my gaze. “Then it appears you’ll have to put up with my presence on your patrols for a bit longer, Ranger.”

I looked at him for a second too long before nodding and turning back to keep driving down the Road. I couldn’t tell if I was imagining his body leaning slightly closer to mine along the bench seat.

One week in there was a stack of new cassettes on the dashboard.

“You brought those to Denali with you?” I asked as we climbed in to get going.

He shook his head. “Needed something other than that one unbearable tape you keep in here – the banjo sounds like it was forged from the materials of a wolf kill site.”

I rolled my eyes and shuffled through the tapes in my hands. “These are all classical,” I said.

“Oh congratulations, you can read.”

I ignored him. “If you didn’t bring these . . . there’s no way you got these shipped all the way out to Toklat faster than a month.”

He shrugged and looked out the window, fingers tapping anxiously for us to start. “I have my methods,” was all he said, and I decided to let it drop.

The next day there was another stack of tapes on the dashboard – all of them bluegrass, my favorite songs and artists even though he’d never asked. I never asked him about it, never even thanked him, and I knew he wasn’t expecting me to say anything about it at all.

And a few days later, when I walked up to him leaning against his tree, he didn’t say anything or thank me when I handed him his own travel mug full of coffee, with powdered milk and some old baking sugar like I figured he would like it. And when we got back to Toklat late that night, after he’d spent hours studying the clawed -up bark on a grove of small trees, the only words he said to me after I cut the engine were, “No milk, tomorrow, Ranger. Just sugar will do.”

Fridays became the days where I got to have my fun. Days where I would drag a sulking and trudging Sherlock Holmes to places of the park where there were bound to be no wolves in sight. Where he would stand by the side of the Road with his arms crossed over his chest saying, “You can’t possibly be serious that you think this will somehow be enjoyable.”

And I would just roll my eyes and start walking, hefting my backpack up higher on my shoulders and following the most logical path across the tundra. And every single Friday, when I was ten steps away, he would inevitably follow after giving a great huff.

I took him to some of my favorite places in the park – some short hikes in the backcountry up near Moose Creek and McKinley River, and following along branches of the Toklat through Polychrome. It was odd, hiking and hearing another person’s footsteps just behind me. He always let me lead when we got far enough away from the Road, never even questioned if I knew which direction to go – staring off into the distance and impatiently tapping his feet whenever I stopped to check our route against my weathered maps. 

“You wanna have a look?” I asked him our first time on one of these hikes, shuffling over so he could have get a look at the map, too.

He didn’t even look down. “Already have it memorized,” he said, as if the map itself had offended him.

“So you have an opinion on where to go?” 

He looked bored and said, “Nope,” loudly popping the ‘p’, and so I shrugged and rolled the maps back up into my pack, and that was that.

Aside from a few multi-day backcountry patrols and some brief trips with Molly and the other kennel Rangers, I’d never really hiked with another person before. I expected it to be annoying – the silence of my own thoughts interrupted by the sounds of another person breathing, having to follow when another person wanted to stop and rest, or re-consult the topo maps, or reflect out loud on the blisters growing on their feet. Having to hear another person’s bear calls or musings.

And instead I quickly found that my heart beat in time to Sherlock’s footsteps just behind me. That when I turned my head over my shoulder while scanning the horizon line for signs of wildlife, and I caught the familiar sight of his sweat-dripping curls in the corner of my vision, that a strange warmth would settle like honey in my throat, momentarily making my breath grow ragged.

We never talked on those hikes – like an unspoken rule. Barely even said any words when deciding which new route to take, whether to cut down a drainage or go up around the edge of a new valley, to skirt around the base of a mountain of scree or scramble up over it to reach the other side. Often just a point and a nod would do fine, and every once in a while, when I made a suggestion that would make our trip just a little bit longer, I heard a soft, “ _Fine_ ,” muttered under his breath.

Any sign of a wolf though – even the tiniest hint of a nearby pack or migration – and he took off like a rocket, sprinting on silent legs across the uneven ground before I could even yell out for him to stop. The first few times he did this I just let him go, barely even picking up my speed to keep pace.

Then one day, embarrassingly late into our new routine, I remembered that the idiot was carrying literally nothing on him other than his customary magnifying glass and ruler, and the second I realized he was off alone in the wilderness with no supplies, I took off after him, calling out my breathless bear call while scrambling through thick brush in the direction he had run, praying that I hadn’t just let the park’s lead wolf researcher get himself killed.

After a quarter-mile of jogging, I half-crawled up over the crest of a small hill, giving a loud whistle in case any wildlife were hiding among the boulders dotting the peak. 

I didn’t hear any wildlife in response, but I did hear, “Goddammit!” echoing across the small valley below. I climbed over a boulder and looked down the slope to see Sherlock standing near the base in waist-thick brush, half-surrounded by blooming wildflowers with his hands on his hips and looking back up at me with fire in his eyes.

My heart skipped a beat and fear pulsed through my body. “What happened? You alright?” I called down, cupping my palms around my mouth.

I started to make my way quickly down the slope, hoping and praying he hadn’t twisted an ankle or gotten cut. I picked up his fallen hat half-way down, nearly hidden in the thick moss. He didn’t answer me until I was almost by his side.

“I _was_ alright,” he finally hissed out.

I took a step back, caught off guard. “You hurt? You twisted something?”

He looked at me like I was the dumbest human being he’d ever seen. “Yes, Ranger, I’m standing here furious because I twisted a measly ankle,” he said, sarcasm dripping from his words.

I rolled my eyes and took a deep breath, trying to calm my thudding heartbeat in my chest back to normal, wondering in the back of my mind when was the last time I’d been so afraid. “The hell did you curse out like that for, then?” 

He clenched his jaw hard before speaking in an irritated rush. “Your ridiculous and completely unnecessary wildlife whistle scared off the female and two pups I was slowly approaching. Do you have any idea how completely unheard of it is to see a black-fur wolf pup in the pack in this area of the park? It’s practically undocumented. And now it never will be – properly, at least - since your bloody display of food chain dominance frightened them off into those distant boulders.”

I blinked hard and tried to focus on what the hell he’d just said. Off in the distance I saw the head of a wolf pop up for a split second before disappearing again within the boulders. “You tried . . . you were _sneaking up_ on a wolf and her two pups?”

He glared at me. “I’d hardly call a highly skilled, silent pursuit ‘sneaking –‘”

“And you were just hoping they’d be delighted to see you when you got close enough for them to smell?”

“I knew exactly how close I could get without them smelling me. The wind speed and direction and the amount of sweat on my body – Honestly, I’ve been studying these animals for more than fifteen years, and you come in and –"

“Are you a fucking idiot?”

His face looked like I’d just slapped him on the cheek. His words died in his mouth. For some reason, the sight of Sherlock Holmes cut off mid-rant, mouth hanging half-open and eyes blown wide, was so out of place that I felt laughter rising up in my chest.

“You fucking idiot,” I said again, this time chuckling, and then, before I knew it, I was laughing out loud, deep, gasping laughs bringing tears to my eyes. He stared at me speechless for only a moment before a light caught in his eyes, and his mouth started to twitch, and then we were laughing together, his deep, warm chuckle sending ripples up my spine, dazzling off the wildflowers that filled the whole valley.

Finally I wiped my eyes, trying to catch my breath. “How you haven’t been found mauled out in the wilderness yet is beyond me,” I said, still a bit breathless.

He tilted his head with a smile still on his lips. “I’ll give you that,” he said.

I shook my head at him and slipped my pack from off my shoulders, unzipping it to dig through the contents inside. “Look, if you’re going to run off into the sunset and you don’t want me chasing after you, you need to carry something other than a goddamn ruler,” I said.

“I told you, I don’t need –”

“Or else I’ll whistle as loud as I can every goddamn time you run off.”

He huffed and rolled his eyes, crossing his arms over his chest. “Fine,” he said, staring over my head out towards the boulders where the wolves had disappeared. I pulled out an extra compass and bear spray from my pack, rising to my feet.

“These are the bare minimum,” I said, holding them out for him to take. When he didn’t move his arms, I bit back another incredulous laugh and tried to look irritated instead. I reached out and dragged him closer to me by the shoulder, reaching out to move his jacket aside so I could reach the pockets of his pants.

“You’re unbelievable,” I said under my breath, and that’s when it happened.

I wrapped the fingers of one hand between the top of his belt and his pants to get a good grip, shoving the compass and bear spray into his pocket with the other. We were standing close – close enough that I could feel his breath puff against my forehead, and the buckle of my own belt was nearly touching the top of his thigh. I yanked him a bit closer by the belt and shoved my hand deeper into his front pocket, making sure the compass and the spray were securely inside, and that’s when I heard him suck in a quick breath from just above me, and the tiniest, smallest wisp of a sound escaped the back of his throat. There was an odd feeling pressed against the space between my stomach and my hip, something warm.

I looked down and realized that he was hard.

Everything froze for one second. I stared openly at the hard outline of his erection in his pants pressed up against my body, dangerously close to where my fingers still clung on to his belt. I was panting. I looked up at him and came face to face with a pair of wide, shocked eyes, staring at me with something like surprise mixed with horror.

It all happened so fast. Before I could even blink he was flinching away from me, stepping back so quickly I nearly fell forward into the empty space. He avoided my gaze and turned the other way. He crushed his hat back onto his head while looking down at his feet as if making sure he hadn’t left any trace behind in the tundra.

“Sherlock –” I tried to say.

He brushed past me back in the direction we had just come, long legs quickly eating up the ground along the slope and leaving me behind at the base. He didn’t even look over his shoulder to make sure I was following.

I watched him go with my stomach in knots. My throat burned. My mind raced to try and figure out where that flash of horror in his eyes had come from – because it had been horror, true horror, and not just embarrassment over some accident. 

I wondered if he felt I had touched him inappropriately by grabbing on to his belt, if he’d let himself succumb to the random biological urge – a freak accident since I was touching him so close to his groin - and then suddenly remembered that I had admitted to Greg that I liked men. If he had been afraid that I was somehow about to take advantage of him– all alone out in the wilderness with nobody to come to his aid. 

If he somehow, _somehow_ , knew my other secret, and if the thought of his body being pressed against mine, if the thought of touching me, being touched by my hands . . .

I couldn’t even follow that train of thought. I blinked hard and rubbed my hands over my face, somehow already certain that my job in the Park Service was over. That Sherlock Holmes was on his way back to Toklat and straight to Nick’s office. “ _Your Ranger grabbed me by the pants when we were all alone,_ ” he would say. “ _He admitted to my colleague that he’s a queer. Ask Greg Lestrade._ ”

Or would he say, would he ask them, with a sick smile on his face, “ _You know your Ranger Watson wasn’t born with the name John?”_

“Ranger,” I suddenly heard, ripping me from my thoughts.

I startled and looked up in the direction of the sound. Sherlock was standing at the top of the hill, rubbing one elbow with his other hand across his stomach. I stared at him blankly.

“Should start to head back,” he said in a calm voice, gesturing with his head over his shoulder towards the Road. 

I took a deep breath and scratched hard at my beard, shouldering my pack before forcing myself to start to walk towards him up the slope. He waited until I was almost at his side before slowly turning and leading the way, hands in his pockets with his eyes watching his feet.

The two miles back to the Road were the longest two miles of my whole life. It was deadly quiet except for the sounds of our steps and breathing – the occasional wildlife call that we seemed to take silent turns calling out. I forced my mind to remain blank, saying a quiet goodbye to the wilderness with each next step I took, feeling like I was walking towards a thick, black doom. Eventually my steps grew slower, following about fifty feet behind him. I forbid myself from looking up at the lines of his shoulders cutting across the landscape – the way his curls always frizzed up a bit under his hat in the breeze. 

The wind carried the scent of him straight to me where I walked, and the whole way back I breathed only through my mouth to avoid the peppercorn and cedar mixed with a sheen of warm sweat.

He silently climbed in when we finally reached the truck, sitting up straight with his hands in his lap and staring out the window, waiting for me to start driving. I gripped the steering wheel hard with my hands. I felt I had to work up the courage to say something to save myself, knowing that it was my last chance before we headed back to Toklat.

I licked my lips and stared straight ahead. I could barely breathe. “I’m . . .” I started. I felt him immediately tense up beside me. It took all the strength in my core to keep talking. “I’m so sorry . . . for that,” I forced myself to say. “I . . . I didn’t mean to—” I paused and rubbed my hand over my face, breathing hard into my palm. I was going to start begging, I could feel it. “Please, please don’t say – I’ll do anything to try and –”

“I’m not on my way to your manager’s office right now, if that’s what you’re thinking.” His voice was soft and slow, not the sharp, clipped way his words normally flowed from his mouth. He was still looking out the window, and his body looked young and small the way he was hunched down in the seat. 

His words took an extra second to sink in. “But –”

“If anything I am entirely to blame in this situation,” he cut me off quietly. “You’ve done nothing wrong.”

I tried to loosen my grip on the steering wheel, watching my knuckles turn white. My voice was slightly shaky. “Wasn’t your fault either, you know. Just . . . just an accident.”

He hummed vaguely. “An accident.”

I wanted to start driving, but instead I took another deep breath. Words came spilling out of me before I could stop them.

“Nobody knows,” I said quietly. “Nobody’s ever known.”

I heard him shift in the car, and then he was turning to look straight at me. I forced myself to meet his gaze, and his eyes looked dark grey. He waited a long moment before speaking, and I felt that he was reading something important in the lines of my face. 

“Believe me when I say it would be incredibly hypocritical of me to out you to anyone,” he finally said. He swallowed hard. “I told you your secret is safe.”

His words finally clicked in my brain, and I took in a sharp breath. “Oh,” was all I said.

He lifted up the corner of his mouth in a small smile, even though it didn’t reach his eyes. “Yes, _oh_.”

I kept looking at the side of his face even after he turned to keep staring out the window. Something about the way his spine still hunched and sagged looked so wrong. I wanted to reach over and grip his shoulders and pull him upright once more – the calm, cool confidence he’d only ever radiated in Denali.

I felt bold, as if I was about to step off the edge of a cliff with no knowledge of the bottom. “So,” I said, almost a whisper. “Are you . . . do people know –”

“No,” he said quietly when I paused. And then he took a breath and spoke so softly I could barely hear him, even in the thick silence of the car. His eyes flickered briefly back to my face when he whispered, “Never. Well, almost never.”

Something changed in that moment – covering over the tense space between us and making it calm, as if I’d just emerged from a warm shower and there was a soft, clean towel being draped over my shoulders. I started the engine without saying anything, ignoring the odd ache that pulsed through my chest and the desire to reach out and just take his hand in mine.

Five minutes in to the short drive back to Toklat, he reached out and flipped on one of his classical tapes in the player, rolling himself up like usual to place his feet up on the dash. When we got back to Toklat, I pulled into the space by the hoses and cut the engine, waiting for him to hop out like usual and disappear up into the trees.

Instead he didn’t move, still curled up in his seat. “I’ll deal with the truck,” he said, meaning the washing and gas. 

I stared at him. “You don’t have to –”

“You always do it,” he said, his voice still unrecognizably quiet and soft. When I finally handed over the keys, deciding to just go with it, his fingers brushed against mine for a second too long.

“I want to check up on a kill site near Unit 5 tomorrow,” he said. He cleared his throat. “If you still want to, if you don’t mind –”

“Of course,” I said quickly. I curled his fingers around the truck keys, hoping I wasn’t smiling like a lunatic that my entire life clearly wasn’t about to end. “I’ll take you first thing.”

He nodded and looked at me, eyes now clear, before hopping down from the truck and moving over to the hoses. My hand burned in the places where our fingers had touched the whole walk back up to my cabin through the trees, and I collapsed asleep on my couch, still in all my dirty clothes, the second after I shut the door behind me.

 

\--

 

People noticed after that.

“Two peas in a pod, the two of you, I swear,” Nick said one morning as he caught sight of me and Sherlock walking down to my truck. “And Greg told me at the beginning of the season you would do everything alone,” he said to Sherlock.

Sherlock stopped in his tracks and gave him a look. “That’s ridiculous – a pod contains more than just two peas inside it. There’s nothing about their biology to suggest something inherently special about just two –”

“Yeah, well, normally he’s pretty quiet,” I said to cut him off, hiding the unexpected nerves twisting in my gut that my coworkers were starting to notice Sherlock always by my side – as if I’d walked out of my cabin in a dream not wearing any pants, trying to play it all off like it was normal. “Think he’s just bumming rides from me so he doesn’t have to drive himself around the park.”

Nick barked a laugh up at the sky, hands on his hips. “Ah, Watson,” he said as Sherlock kept walking down the hill. “You know where to find me if he gets too much in your hair.”

I rubbed the back of my neck, wondering how I could respond to that without blurting out that Sherlock Holmes would never, in a million years, get too much in my hair.

“Ranger!” Sherlock called out from where he waited by the truck, hands over his chest like a child.

I rolled my eyes and looked back once at Nick. “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said, starting off after Sherlock and waving behind me. 

I heard Nick give another laugh behind me as I walked away. “Two peas in a pod,” he said again, chuckling.

Greg caught my arm after a staff meeting later that week. I hadn’t seen him in a while beyond a passing smile and wave, and I accepted the warm handshake he gave me with a genuine smile.

“Haven’t seen you around that much,” I told him.

He laughed. “Christ, I could say the same thing about you. Was afraid Sherlock had off and kidnapped you when I hadn’t seen you in a bit, and then Max said the last time he’d seen you had been driving away early one morning with Sherlock in your truck.”

Greg waited for me to answer with a smile and a questioning look in his eyes. I wiped my hand over my mouth and scratched at my beard – something Molly always made fun of me for doing whenever I got caught in an Interp conversation with a visitor.

“Yeah, I, uh . . . I’ve been taking him around a bit, I guess.”

Greg’s smiling frown grew deeper. “And you agreed to this? You’re still alive?”

That odd sensation that I was missing something when it came to Sherlock Holmes flared up again in my chest. “Honestly,” I said, putting my hands in my pockets. “He’s quiet as a mouse most of the time. Just waits around during my patrols and then tells me what sites he wants to go to for research when I’m done. Bolts off whenever he sniffs out a wolf, though. It’s like he’s got a wolf sonar tucked away somewhere in his head.”

I left out the part where I took Sherlock on hikes every Friday. Somehow, even though I’d never felt that way before, it now felt like a tiny secret – something I had to protect, and which would whither and die if it ever was told.

Greg laughed and tilted his head. “That sounds more like him,” he said. His mouth turned serious, and he gave me a long look. “Look, John,” he said, leaning towards me where we stood. “You ever need a break from him following you around, you just let me know.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “Honestly, I can’t believe you’ve even made it this long.”

Something like anger flared for a moment in my chest. I stood up straighter. “It’s kinda nice, actually,” I said, feeling like I was trying not to give something away without even knowing what that ‘something’ was. “Having a little company when I’m out in the park. And it’s cool to watch his research – the parts where he isn’t tasting weird shit the kill sites at least.”

Greg’s eyes were warm. “You actually like the bastard, don’t you?” he asked, grinning.

I ducked my head a bit, trying not to smile too wide. “Guess I do.”

Greg hummed. “Actually, it’s probably good for him, too. Someone to make sure he doesn’t end up mauled in the middle of the wilderness.”

I laughed, hearing my own words thrown back at me. “I told him the same thing,” I said. “Took me weeks just to get him to carry his own damn bear spray.”

Greg’s eyes widened. “You actually got him to carry spray?”

“And a compass.”

“Well, shit,” Greg said and rocked back on his heels. “I’ve known the man and worked with him for nearly fifteen years, and I’ve never _once_ seen him carry more than that goddamn magnifying glass and ruler.”

“Actually –” I stopped myself, feeling that I was somehow about to go behind Sherlock’s back – betray some unspoken rule between us to not ask or answer anything remotely about ourselves. My curiosity was raging, though, keeping me up at night. “Actually, I meant to ask you. . .” I started.

Greg grinned. “You can try, mate, but you probably know loads more about him than me at this point.”

I ignored the little burst of warmth that fluttered in my chest. “Well,” I went on. “You all are following the tracking collars they put on in ’86, right? So why . . . I mean he’s always . . .what the hell is he even doing?”

Greg laughed and shook his head, letting out a sigh. “I ask myself that question about twenty times a year,” he said. “Me, Max, and Babs – well, that’s what we’re doing. Following the trackers, mapping out the territorial changes and all that. Documenting kill sites and signs of habitat.”

I nodded my head, following. “Right . . .”

“But Sherlock,” Greg shook his head again. “Never needed to use tracking collar feedback in all the years I’ve worked with him. You weren’t too far off with that joke about his wolf sonar – he just . . . looks at a goddamn site and somehow _knows_. He’s found and saved packs that would’ve died in a matter of years if it hadn’t been for him.” He looked at me, eyes soft. “So you see now why we just let him do whatever the hell he wants. Sherlock wants to stay locked up in a cabin and not talk to anyone for weeks? Fine. Sherlock wants to somehow goad a Ranger into driving him across the park? Fine. Sherlock wants to jump out of a bloody moving car just to sniff some wolf scat? Be my guest.”

I laughed along with him, relieved somehow at the warmth which Greg was using to talk about him, now that we established I wasn’t trying to get Sherlock the hell out of my truck.

“As long as he knows what he’s doing, then,” I said.

“Greg!”

We both looked up to see Molly waving from the turn off from the Park Road. She’d pulled her van over with the window rolled down, on her trip out to Wonder Lake with the people from the kennels for a day picnic.

Greg’s face lit up, his brown eyes shining the way sunlight warmed the copper rock and stone at the base of Denali’s peak.

I nodded towards the Road. “Tell her hello for me,” I said.

“Oh, hi John!” we heard called out. Molly waved again out the window as I lifted my hand in response.

“Just a minute!” Greg yelled back. He looked at me just as I was stepping aside to let him pass, reaching out to grip my shoulder with his hand. His palm was warm.

“One last thing,” he said. I lifted my eyebrows for him to continue, wondering where he was going with this – what he felt was so necessary to say. I desperately hoped he wasn’t going to bring up what we spoke about at the campfire – ask me to stay silent, or assure me that he would stay silent too.

Hoped he wasn’t about to ask me if there was another reason I was letting Sherlock Holmes ride along in my truck.

He cleared his throat. “All I’ll say is, I have more respect for Sherlock Holmes than any other person alive,” he said seriously. “Don’t think that . . . with me asking you if you’re alright with him tagging along and all, or poking fun at that odd little head of his . . . I would trust him with my life. Have done, in the past, when we’ve been out in the wilderness together.”

I nodded, embarrassed that my throat was closing up. Greg went on, “But Sherlock doesn’t know how to _be_ with people. All my years of working with him and I’ve never said two sentences to him that didn’t have something to do with wolves.”

I frowned, still confused. “Right . . .”

“He chooses to ride in that truck with you,” he said. “Who knows why, but he does.”

And suddenly, like a burst of sunlight breaking through the clouds, I understood exactly what Greg was trying to say. I smiled at him and nodded, clearing my throat so I could speak clearly. “I’ll watch out for him,” I told him, and there was a little wave of relief that passed through his deep eyes.

Molly honked the horn behind us. I stepped aside. “She’ll run over you with that thing if you don’t get your ass over there,” I said. And Greg gave my shoulder one last quick pat before jogging down the gravel road towards Molly’s old, grey van. 

 

\--

 

I woke up to the sound of my cabin door slamming. 

“Ranger!”

My eyes flew open, heart already racing as adrenaline ripped me from the middle of a deep sleep. My room was still dark, and the sheets felt heavy on my limbs. For a moment I wondered if I was dreaming, imagining the footsteps hurtling towards my bedroom door, or the rush of air that followed when that door was thrown open.

“Up! Hurry up or we’ll miss it!”

But I knew I couldn’t be imagining that voice in my own bedroom – not in that much detail, and not at that volume.

And then it dawned on me: Sherlock Holmes was apparently in my bedroom, and I was sleeping only in my boxers under a very thin sheet.

“Shit!” I flinched and yanked up the covers over my chest, praying that the room was too dark for him to have seen anything other than a dark blob. My blood roared in my veins. I rolled over onto my stomach, still trying to force myself awake. “What the hell are you doing?” I moaned.

I saw a silhouette topped with curls bounce impatiently in the doorway from the faint light coming from the gaslight in the kitchen, apparently unconcerned that I’d just cursed myself awake.

“Reports from overnight of new activity over in Unit 12,” he said in a rush. “A pack hasn’t been spotted there in decades – if we hurry we might see the evidence of which pack it is before the bloody busses scare everything away. Now come _on_.”

I rubbed my hands over my face and looked up at him, his features a little clearer now as my eyes adjusted to the faint light. “Fuck, Sherlock, you can’t just barge into my goddamn cabin like that.” I glanced over at the glowing red numbers of the clock. “It’s fucking five in the morning on my fucking day off.”

“Your language at this hour leaves much to be desired,” he said. “I’m well aware of the date and time, and now you are aware that there is a once in a lifetime wolf pack sighting happening right now, which will be entirely your fault if I miss for documentation.”

I groaned and turned my face into my pillow. “Drive yourself,” I mumbled.

When he paused for a moment too long to answer that question, I looked back up at him still standing in the doorway. I could see him open and close his mouth a few times.

“Please,” he finally said, soft on the tip of his tongue. “Will you take me?”

I sighed, knowing my answer before I even opened my mouth. “God, fine,” I said, stretching my arms over my head. “Just – just give me a second, yeah?”

To my relief Sherlock nodded then backed out of the room, slowly closing the bedroom door behind him. I groaned and pulled myself out of bed, mind still in a daze as I searched in the darkness for the black tank top I’d been wearing before bed the night before. I pulled it on over my arms which still felt like lead, then, without thinking at all, made my way for my bedroom door, the only thought on my mind being getting a pot of thick coffee started.

I squinted against the burst of light coming from my cabin lamp. I shielded my eyes with my hand and ran another one through my beard and hair. Sherlock was standing fully dressed by the main window, looking out at the moonlight still bathing the trees. He was tapping his fingers impatiently on the windowsill.

“Need coffee,” I muttered, making my way into the small kitchen.

He turned around at my voice, and his eyes locked on to me. For a second, just a second, I saw his eyes widen, heard his breath hitch as he stared straight at my arms and chest. For one blinding moment I thought maybe I’d walked out without a shirt, but then I remembered I was covered, the two ropy, pink lines hidden. I gave him a small frown as he still stared at me, lips slightly parted. Then he shook his head quickly and blinked hard a few times before turning to look back out the window.

“You have sixty seconds to be ready,” he said in his usual voice.

I shook my head, wondering if I’d just imagined that awkward moment. I moved towards the kettle on the stove and flicked it on, pulling down a scoop full of coffee beans from the cabinet and going about my usual routine – as if I hadn’t been woken up by a man bursting into my bedroom.

He was silent as I got ready, surprisingly not complaining when I obviously took longer than sixty seconds. Once the coffee was brewing I moved back towards my room.

“Lemme get changed,” I said, to which he just nodded, still staring out the window.

I shut the door and flicked on the little lamp, moving towards the tiny closet tucked into the wall. I pulled out my usual day-off clothes – jeans and a flannel and my non-uniform jacket. I looked down to pull up my jeans, then gasped.

I hadn’t had anything in my boxers.

I hadn’t had anything in there – no bulge at all between my legs – and I’d just walked out in front of the most goddamn observant man on the entire planet, practically flaunting that the space between my thighs was empty. I’d walked out there and not even _thought_ about it – not even noticed that something was wrong. I’d stood right in front of him making coffee. He’d stared right at me as I came out of my room, bathed directly in the light from the lamp.

My skin ran cold. Sweat started to prickle at the back of my neck and under my arms, and I could hear my ragged breathing as I stood frozen in the closet, half-holding my jeans in my hands. 

My fingers shook.

The knock on my door startled me. “I’ll resort to other tactics besides politeness very soon,” I heard through the door.

I caught my breath and forced myself to move, slowly pulling on my jeans over numb legs. “So your version of politeness was bursting into my cabin in the middle of the night?”

I heard him huff. “I said please,” he said back, nearly whining. “And this is hardly the middle of the night.”

I yanked on my flannel. “For god’s sake, you’re like a toddler.”

My throat felt dry as I pulled the sock from my bedside drawer, holding it for a longer moment than usual in my hand. Fear still burned at the base of my spine – fear mixed with confusion that he seemed to be carrying on as usual. That he had to have seen, he _had_ to have noticed, and yet, maybe he hadn’t noticed. Maybe he hadn’t seen at all.

I slipped my hand down my jeans and into my boxers, adjusting until my jeans fit naturally around the bulge. For one brief moment a thought flashed through my mind – that maybe I could just walk out there again without it. Could go a full day without worrying about how it looked – constantly aware of it rubbing oddly between my legs, or looking out of place, or shifting uncomfortably against my bare skin, rubbing it raw. If I could simply put it back in the drawer and walk out and live my day.

The moment passed just as quickly as it had come on. I kept it in.

Sherlock handed me my Stanley full of black coffee when I emerged – somehow having also found the mug I usually used for his, too. I washed my face and teeth with a cupful of hauled water over the sink before nodding at him that I was ready to head out. I could practically feel the energy vibrating from him as we walked down towards the truck.

“Right then, towards which Unit?” I asked once we were pulling out of the parking lot.

He was tapping his fingers rapidly against the travel mug in his hands. “Thirty-three.”

We didn’t say anything more during the short drive – less than forty-five minutes to the little lookout near Stony where we could safely park. The sun was just starting to pour gold over the tallest peaks, bathing the tundra in a swirling silver mist. I shouldered my pack and set off to follow his lead, weaving down a steep drainage that let out into the valley, calling out, “Hey bear,” even more than usual so we wouldn’t startle awake a still-sleeping grizzly. 

When we reached the bottom, he held out his hand, speaking for the first time since we entered the truck. “I’m probably about to run off,” he said, eyes still scanning the distance for signs of the pack.

It was his usual code. I reached into my backpack and pulled out his spray and compass, placing them into his outstretched hand. 

“Just give me the whistle,” I told him – the little bird call he would give whenever he got too far for me to track.

He nodded, then took two steps, then immediately dropped to his hands and knees. He sniffed at some invisible part of the river rock, lifting a tuft of moss right up to his nose, and then, quicker than lightning, he was on his feet and running, sprinting down the dry fork of the river we’d been following and before long disappearing around a bend of moss and brush.

I rolled my eyes and let him go, taking the time to look at the sunrise surrounding me, feeling it slowly warm the hidden parts of my body down in my bones.

An hour passed before I heard the whistle. I’d been following along the same dry bed, only having to change course once when I came a bit too close to a grazing moose. The whistle came from high up on my right on top of a plateau. I scanned along the ridge, looking for a drainage I could climb up, or a smoother path. In the dawn sunlight my eyes caught sight of a caribou trail, zig zagging steadily up the side of the slope.

I followed it up, turning back over my shoulder to see if we could begin to see the curves of the Road from that height. Far off in the distance, just a little speck floating across the earth, I saw the glinting lines of one of the earliest Kantishna Experience busses winding its way through the steepest part of Stony pass. 

I spotted Sherlock immediately once I reached the top, standing near a glittering pool in the little dip of a valley cradled by a wall of higher peaks. He was standing completely still, looking out at something on the other side of the pool. I thought I saw something move in the direction he was looking – a little speck of dark fur far too small to be a bear.

He didn’t look at me when I came up beside him. Our breaths fogged together in the cold air.

After a few minutes of standing shoulder to shoulder in silence he spoke. “It’s the pup,” he said quietly. I frowned and squinted harder in the direction he was staring, scanning the tundra on the other side of the pool.

Then I saw it.

That little speck of fur I’d seen hadn’t been moving. It was crumpled on the ground, its belly pink and covered in blood where it twisted unnaturally towards the sky. It was the dark-furred pup Sherlock had seen a few weeks back, dead for less than an hour.

I didn’t know what to say. We stood there staring at the carcass for another few minutes, and I could feel an odd emotion radiating from him beside me – something that felt like failure, mixed with disappointment, mixed with something else.

Finally I spoke, whispering for no reason at all. “Shouldn’t stay here too long,” I said. “Prey will probably come back to finish it off for something to eat.”

He nodded. I knew he knew that, but he still didn’t move. Just when I was opening my mouth to say it again, he pointed slowly out at the hills behind where the pup was lying.

A wolf was silently creeping down the grass slope, keeping its head low and scanning the area of the pool. We both stood frozen still – even my breathing was just the tiniest sips in my lungs. The wolf made its way through the shadows of the dawn light, slowly making its way towards the pup by the water’s edge.

“The mother,” Sherlock whispered, so soft I could barely hear him.

I sucked in a breath, recognizing the sleek fur and dark ears from a few weeks before. She kept her nose to the ground as she walked, hunched over as if she would dash away at any moment.

I shivered up my spine when she finally reached the pup. She stood frozen, sniffing around its head covered in crusted blood. She reached out with a paw and gently pushed it a few times, nudging between its ears with her snout to straighten out its snapped neck.

She looked down at it for a long time, and the earth was utterly still. Then she raised her head up towards the clear golden sky and howled, a long mournful sound that vibrated in my core and shivered along my arms. I heard Sherlock’s breath shudder beside me, and for a moment our fingertips brushed together between our thighs.

A chorus of howls echoed her from far off in the distance. 

“Let’s go,” Sherlock suddenly said, turning away without another glance to make his way back towards where we came. I watched her for another moment as she looked down at the pup, then turned to follow him back down into the dry river bed.

He was off all morning – silent and still as we drove back to Toklat, not even curling his feet up on the dashboard or pushing in a tape. He murmured a quiet, “Thanks,” as he hopped down from the truck back in the lot, disappearing up the hill before I could say anything other than, “Yeah.”

I spent the day catching up on rest on my couch with a book in my hands. I realized after hours passed that I hadn’t turned the page.

I found him again that evening – strolling along the river rock that ran alongside Toklat with his hands in his pockets and a curve in his spine. I caught his eye and waved back towards my truck behind me. “Come on,” I said. He looked at me for a moment before starting to walk towards me, and I formed a quick plan on the spot as we walked towards the truck. 

He didn’t ask where we were going as he climbed in beside me. I could still feel that odd emotion radiating from his skin, making the air in the truck feel so thick I rolled the windows down just to feel like I could breathe. I sped back towards Stony just as twilight started to fall, softening the earth with a smooth velvet haze and causing the tundra to look like rolling hills of green pearls. 

I parked in the place where I knew it would happen, pulling over to the side in case a late bus came through.

“Come on,” I said, stepping down from the truck and quietly shutting the door. I climbed up onto the roof, patting the space beside me for him to sit.

He looked up at me from the dirt road. “If you’re about to suggest stargazing or some other pointless activity, I’ll take off and walk back to Toklat.”

I rolled my eyes, patting the roof again. “Just get your ass up here and be quiet,” I said. “We’re not fucking stargazing.”

He sighed like I was the most exhausting person on the whole planet, then smoothly leapt up to join me, sitting a careful few inches apart. When he started to fidget, I put my hand on his knee for just a moment.

“Just wait,” I whispered. 

His whole body stilled at my touch, and I knew I didn’t imagine the way his spine seemed to sway in my direction. He took a deep breath, one that echoed in my own lungs, and we sat there and waited, held in the soft silence that had descended on the park.

We didn’t have to wait long. About five minutes later, right on time, the first few heads of the herd of caribou poked their heads over the nearby hill, starting to rise up over the crest for their nightly migration down into the valley across the Road. They spilled down the hillside, gently clomping through the brush as their thick coats glittered beneath the slowly rising stars. Soon the entire hillside sloping down to the road was covered in grazing caribou, moving smooth like water through waves of soft moss.

I’d seen this scene a handful of times before – it was an open secret among the Rangers that coming near this point in the road around this time meant a pretty good shot at seeing this particular herd move through. And still, I felt like I was showing Sherlock Holmes the most secret thing on the entire earth – like somehow, written in the little noses of the baby caribou sprinting in pairs across the rocks, Sherlock could see the physical heart pumping blood in my chest.

Like somehow, written in the reflection of the stars on their hooves, Sherlock could hear the first time I ever said the name John.

We watched them in silence for a long time, long after the sun had started to dip below the peaks. Our shoulders leaned against each other, and I could feel his chest rising and falling as he breathed. He was warm, impossibly warm, where his body pressed against mine. Between the tops of our thighs, the tips of our fingers barely touched, holding on to the now-cold metal hood of the truck.

Just when I was about to suggest we head back, he spoke. “You know, Ranger,” he said, his voice blending in with the wind blowing gently across the tundra. “You’re the only person I’ve ever met in my life whose presence doesn’t bore me to tears, and despite all of my research, I can’t for the life of me figure out _why_.”

My breath caught in my throat. I couldn’t turn to look at him, afraid that if I did I would lean forward and press my cheek against his, wanting to feel the smooth lines of his angular jaw against my own.

Instead I moved the fingers of my right hand, slowly, just barely, until they rested on top of some of his, hidden in the space between our thighs from the wide world. He hummed softly when our hands touched, and he never pulled away.

It was dark when we made it back. Neither of us had said anything more the whole trip – not since the moment my fingers rested on top of his. He looked at me for a long moment after I cut the engine, and it seemed like his eyes were tracing every line of my face. Then he nodded, just once, before stepping down from the truck, immediately swallowed up by the darkness and hidden from the stars.

When I was back in my cabin, I stood in the center of the kitchen for a long time, looking at my socked feet against the floor – looking at nothing. I got undressed slowly in the half-dark of my bedroom, a strange buzz still settling in my chest and the tips of my fingers, as if I was waiting for a gun to go off so I could sprint across a field. When I was completely naked, I walked over to my small closet, meaning just to reach in and grab a fresh pair of boxers to throw on.

Instead I caught sight of myself in the crooked full-length mirror – the one I barely ever used but was too lazy to ever take down. I looked at myself for longer than I ever remembered doing in my whole life, slowly tracing my collarbones and the lines of my shoulders. The little trio of dark freckles at the base of my throat. The two scars on my chest, still harsh and red even after all these years from the botched healing after the surgery. The too-slim lines of my waist and hips, even covered in muscle and thick, pale hair. The space between my legs – the place which burned my eyes to look at. My knees – covered in bruises and faint scars from playing as a child. The dent in my left shin from the time I tried to hop a fence when I was ranching.

I looked at it all, until I couldn’t even tell how much time had passed. Then I covered my face with my hands, the familiar scratch of my beard rasping softly against my calloused palms. I breathed a deep sigh, feeling it all the way to my toes. 

And I wondered what the fuck I’d been thinking putting my hand on top of Sherlock Holmes’ - _me_ , of all goddamn people - right in full view of the wide open stars.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you SO much for reading. Your comments make Lugnut roll onto his back for belly rubs and your kudos make me feel like I'm watching a herd of caribou at twilight. I am truly, truly grateful.
> 
> Fun fact: Sarah Jarosz is currently on tour as part of a band "I'm With Her" - with Sara Watkins and Aoife O’Donovan. I've seen Sarah Jarosz live three times, and she is one of those musicians who sounds even better live. If you have a chance to catch one of their shows, I can't recommend it highly enough! We'll be driving 18 hours just to see them :)
> 
> Next time: we're back in 1992. John has to take Sherlock back out on his patrols, and John gets an unexpected late-night knock at his cabin door.


	7. May - June 1992

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bluegrass: Listen to Alison Krauss and Union Station sing "Lay My Burden Down" [HERE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Y0XK1aRPsk/).
> 
> Sarah Jarosz: listen to "Take Me Back" [HERE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o09TRCS-m-w/). 
> 
> *Note (Mild Spoilers): This chapter contains a traumatic memory from John's past that involves accidentally being seen in a shower. I wanted to put that up front in case anyone feels it would be upsetting for them to read. I can also honestly say that this chapter is the one and only time the words "pussy" and "tits" will ever be used in this fic (they're really not my fav, but it will make unfortunate sense in context). This chapter also directly involves / contains references to drugs and drug use. Honestly, it's a pretty sad chapter. It's not "the sad Lugnut chapter" that we all know is coming, but it's still sad. Practice self care and read when it feels right and safe for you to read!

May - June 1992

At five forty-five in the morning I stood fully dressed in my kitchen, holding a cup of coffee in my hand that had long grown cold and staring across the room in the dark.

The coffee mug I’d always used for Sherlock the last summer sat empty on the countertop next to my hand. I hadn’t yet decided whether I was going to fill it up.

Through the thick darkness outside the window – the little cluster of nearby cabins and trees – I could just barely make out a faint light coming from one of the cabin windows. I knew exactly which cabin that light was coming from, glowing through the curtain the way the Park Road always seemed to explode from the earth in glittering silver, when you’d been searching for it after days being out in the backcountry all alone. 

A familiar shadow passed in front of the window about every other minute, slowly walking across the worn hardwood with his head tipped down. He was pacing, I could tell. I hated the part of me that desperately wanted to know whether he was just doing his usual routine – staying up all night trying to track wolf packs in his head – or whether he was pacing for a different reason altogether. Whether this time, this morning, he was pacing for the same reason I was standing awake in the dark drinking a cold cup of coffee.

I was thinking of him. 

I was thinking of the first morning I’d ever woken up beside him – just days before I tipped us over the edge by taking his face in my hands and kissing his mouth. I was thinking of the way the early morning light had illuminated the tent. The way my breath had fogged in the air, and the way the condensation dripped down the sides of the tent because of the two warm bodies inside – and there had been a bird singing just outside, greeting the early dawn through thick, white mist.

The way his arm had been wrapped tightly around my waist through our layers of clothes. The way I could feel the full length of his sleeping bag molded along my spine, rising and falling as he breathed deeply in sleep.

The way I hadn’t been afraid at all to wake up so close to another human being. The way I’d pressed my spine back into his warm chest, and the way he hadn’t moved back after he’d woken up with me in his arms.

An hour later my hand hovered over the other mug on the counter. I’d boiled new water and poured over another cup of coffee, and I watched as the steam rose up into the grey air. The folded-over bag of sugar I’d only ever used for him sat nearby, still taped shut.

I wanted to think of the first day I’d ever brought it to him, how his eyes had lit up as I met him by his usual tree, and the way our fingers touched when I handed it over without a word. 

Instead I thought of his face the moment after I’d said, “ _I’m leaving_.” Pure devastation that had left hot shame in my throat my whole solo hike back.

I left the fresh coffee and the sugar and the mug behind.

He wasn’t waiting for me by the tree when I walked out right at seven. I ignored the little flash of disappointment in my chest and told myself to be relieved – that maybe he’d been just as angry at Nick’s new schedule change as me, and maybe he’d just decided to blow it all off. Let sleeping dogs lie.

But he was waiting for me by the truck, leaning against the hood. I forced myself not to hesitate in my step as I walked down to meet him, giving him a brief nod. His eyes flicked quickly to my own coffee cup in my hands – just the one. I thought I saw a flash of something in his gaze, an emotion so fast I couldn’t even catalogue it as disappointment, but immediately I felt like an absolute shit for not bringing him that extra mug.

We settled into the seats in silence. He was wearing different clothes than he had the season before – no longer the official Ranger uniform since the NPS wasn’t paying his way. He had on worn jeans and a plaid flannel buried under a thick tan coat. They hung off him in a way that made him look small beneath the fabric – so different from the way I’d seen clothes fit him before that it took me the whole rest of the morning to realize he’d worn those same clothes last summer.

I held my breath in anticipation of the rush of his cologne, but it never came. He smelled like clothes kept in a trunk for too long, and a little bit of generic soap just at the base of his neck.

The engine sounded violently loud in the quiet camp, echoing like dynamite blasts through the dry river bed of the Toklat. I spoke to him for the first time after the engine was already purring, needing something to hide the way my lungs were constricting my voice.

“Do you know which Units you wanted to check out fir—”

“This wasn’t my idea,” he cut me off. 

His voice sucked the breath from my throat. I waited, balancing on a sharp ledge, for the entire park to up and explode – to turn into ash.

“Right,” I said. I opened my mouth to tell him about my conversation with Nick, but he went on, staring straight ahead with his hands folded in his lap. His feet weren’t up on the dashboard.

“I told your insufferable head of Interp that I was perfectly fine going out to do my research on my own,” he said. “I’ve the bus schedule memorized and could easily borrow any one of your government vans. You are perfectly within your rights to leave now, and I’ll take myself where I need to go. I can tell Nick that I still accompanied you – it’s easy enough to steal an extra van out from under his nose and return it before he even realizes. Or I’ll tell him you and I came to an agreement that you’d rather do your usual patrols. Or I’ll say I’d rather review the collar tracking data from the season before for the next few weeks and wait until Greg gets here to do field research with him. Any of those choices would be perfectly fine with me – just say which one I should tell Nick and then you can go about your day. We need never mention this again, and I assure you, you’ll hardly see me for the rest of your summer. Your patrols can go on as normal.”

I tried to catch my breath, mind reeling after his speech. I felt breathless as I spoke, “Sherlock –”

“And you can also be rest assured that nothing of last summer will ever come to light,” he went on, and I knew I wasn’t imagining the cold tone of his voice – the prepared speech being read off a page, flat and perfectly smooth. “I told you once that your secrets are safe with me, and that will never change. You have nothing to fear from my returning here to carry on the research for another year. No one will be the wiser about whatever occurred between us.”

The truck was dead silent after he finished speaking. Suddenly I was furious. The quiet rage bubbled up unwanted in my chest – the fact that he could sit there, perfectly calm and straight in his seat, and talk about all of this like it was some business transaction to work out and sign. The fact that he was simply waiting for me to tell him which lie to pass on to Nick. 

The fact that he thought that I thought he would unmask me to everyone in Denali – that, even after everything, I would think low enough of him to fear what he could say, as if he held some great power over me because he’d kissed my naked skin. 

That he could talk about those precious few months where we had . . . where we had been _one_ , as something like a mistake that I would make him lie and swear never to reveal. Never to tell anyone that he knew exactly what was hidden beneath my uniform. 

I turned to look at him, fully intending to tell him off – tell him to go fuck himself if he thought he had the upper hand. That he could waltz back into Denali with everything under control like some grand master plan. That while I was wasting away in the bottom of the Grand Canyon, that he was simply thinking about an unfinished research project he wanted to get back to – concocting a way to do it that would involve the least amount of John Watson possible.

He turned to look at me too, slightly flinching back in his seat, and then I saw his eyes.

Deep grey circles on the delicate skin beneath his lashes, and the gaunt lines of his cheekbones, and the way the barest edge of his eyes were outlined in soft red. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days, or in weeks.

The tips of his eyelashes were wet, as if he’d been . . .

I sighed and forced the anger to leave my body, realizing in a great rush that it had only been anger at myself – that I had gotten hold of the brilliant man who’d once leapt up into my truck in a suit and reduced him into _this_ in the span of one short summer.

I put my hands back on the wheel and shifted the truck into gear. “We’re not gonna do any of that,” I told him as I started to drive, hoping my voice didn’t sound as resigned as I felt. “Now, which unit?” I asked again.

I could feel him staring at the side of my face, tracing the still smooth-shaven lines of my jaw. I knew exactly what he was thinking – probably indignant that I was taking away his plan, making him go along with being in my truck as if it was somehow the most patronizing thing in all the earth. I waited for the onslaught and rebuttal, the listing of more plans and potential lies.

Instead he just breathed out a long sigh though his nose. He disappeared even more beneath the too-big clothes.

“Twenty-nine,” he said towards the window. “Please.”

“Right,” I said again, like it was the only word I knew.

Ten minutes in to the drive and he still hadn’t put his feet up on the dashboard. I reached down and picked up my Stanley, taking a sip before holding it out.

“Coffee?” I asked, hating how desperately I wanted him to reach out and steal it from my hands.

He shook his head slowly. “Already had some,” he said.

I took another sip just so I wouldn’t have to awkwardly put the mug back into the holder, feeling like I’d just held out a stale treat to Lugnut, which he’d rejected after sniffing it for a few seconds in my palm. We didn’t say anything more the whole drive to twenty-nine.

I pulled my truck off to the side after Sherlock said, “Here.” I stepped down and began to rummage around in my bag, looking for the extra compass and bear spray I’d packed at five o’clock that morning with shaking hands.

When I looked up to hand them to him, Sherlock was shouldering a bag of his own – one I hadn’t even noticed he’d had with him in the truck.

My hand stayed awkwardly outstretched between us. “You still need these?” I asked.

He shook his head and reached over his shoulder to pat the bag on his back. “Figured I’d finally get my own,” he said.

My hand still stayed in the air for a second too long before I put the spray and compass back in my own pocket. I cleared my throat, feeling like I’d never before walked off into the wilderness – as if taking more than five steps away from the Road would leave me lost forever in the backcountry until I died. I nodded out at the tundra. “Lead the way,” I said.

We set off. He didn’t speed ahead, and he didn’t walk behind me. Instead he walked just barely in front of me and to the side, in a way he never had before on all the trips we’d ever taken. Every once in a while, his neck turned to the side towards his shoulder, as if he was about to look behind and make sure I was still there, but he never looked all the way back. Our feet stayed out of sync, never falling into step, and I felt each of his footsteps like a jarring rhythm against the beat of my heart pumping blood in my chest. I never once smelled his sweat carried on the soft breeze.

He found the research site without any trouble at all, just over a mile back into the brush. I stood off to the side with my hands in my pockets as he got out his supplies – his ruler and his magnifying glass, a paper map and pencil.

I used to watch him when he did this. Stand leaning against a nearby rock or grab a seat in the soft moss as he examined a site for hours, doing nothing at all except watching the smooth curve of his back, now and then scanning the horizon for any signs of wildlife to make sure we were safe. He would illuminate the whole landscape – a bright burst of light streaking across the tundra as he crawled around on his knees with his nose two inches from the ground, or lifted samples up to the sunlight, or dashed off to follow another lead. 

He would do all of that knowing that I was watching his every move – a private version of himself, stripped bare, that I knew was for my eyes alone. 

That day I couldn’t watch. It looked so wrong, the way he knelt gently on his knees by the site and dutifully scribbled measurements and notes onto the map – the way he kept his pencil behind his ear when he wasn’t using it. The way he never once looked back over his shoulder to smile at me, knowing immediately where I was standing even though it had been an hour since he last looked.

After a few minutes I moved away, following a slope up to a little bluff overlooking the valley with the Road winding through it in the distance. I counted the busses as they passed – the old silver park busses and the forest green Kantishna lodge tours, usually lifting a hand to wave at a little kid who would notice me perched up in the hills, smiling like hell out the window and making the whole bus think they’d just seen a moose or a bear.

About half an hour later there were footsteps coming up behind me. “I’m ready to go,” I heard.

I frowned and turned back over my shoulder. “Already?”

He nodded and turned to walk down the hill, quickly disappearing behind the rocky green slope. I scrambled to my feet to catch up, feeling like I’d just been tossed off a cliff without wings – as if the fact the earth was round had suddenly been announced as incorrect.

He didn’t wait for me to catch up on the way back. I followed far behind, every now and then catching sight of his curls peeking up through the hills or just disappearing around a bend. I heard his bear call once, in a tone of voice that made me realize he must have encountered one fairly close. 

Last summer his bear call had been listing off every reason it would be illogical for the bear to come closer and attack. The speech would continue sometimes for hours after the bear had lumbered away, in a way that had made me laugh so hard I’d have to bend over and put my hands on my knees. 

That time it was just the standard, “hey bear, hey bear,” and the sound of it made my chest ache in a very raw way – the sharpest thing I’d felt since he’d said my name behind me just before sunrise weeks ago.

He was waiting in the truck when I reached the Road, taking a long sip of water with the window rolled down. I threw my bag in the back and climbed up next to him. “Where to next?” I asked, starting the engine.

He capped the water without offering me any. “No need. I’ve got everything I needed from this site.”

When I was dead silent, he went on, as if explaining himself was the most tedious thing he’d ever experienced in his life. “Greg asked me to use the first weeks I was here to check up on the collar data that got tracked over the winter. I’ve just checked on up that data. Therefore, I’m now fine until Greg arrives and we come up with our new plan for this season.”

I wanted to stare at him. I wanted to ask him since when in hell he called Greg ‘Greg,’ and since when he actually gave a shit about the tracking data, and since when he did anything anyone else told him to do when it came to wolves.

But those questions felt too familiar – reserved for a man I would hold in my arms later that night instead of a coworker whom I hadn’t even asked about how he spent his winter. I shrugged and started up the engine, hating the fact that my gut clenched at the thought of returning to Toklat so soon. “So, I’ll just take you back then?” I asked.

He nodded. “Please.”

When we pulled back onto the Road, I gestured a hand towards the dashboard. “You wanna listen to anything?” I asked. “I’ve still got –”

My words died on my tongue. I hadn’t meant to admit that I still had every tape he’d ever given me, stashed away in the glove box even though I hadn’t even looked at them in almost a year.

He acted like he didn’t notice me stop mid-sentence. “If you want,” he said.

I didn’t put in a tape.

When we got back to Toklat, he hopped down and immediately walked over to the hose. I let him do it, standing back from the truck and holding one elbow in my hand, knowing that I had absolutely no reason for not leaving to walk back up to my cabin, or heading to the offices to see if they needed me to pick up an extra patrol.

When he was done he grabbed his bag from the front seat. My mind screamed at me to move, to just nod and walk away, but suddenly the thought of walking away felt like a goodbye I wasn’t ready to say – as if we could just stand forever by the truck in thick silence, never getting closer but never moving farther apart either. Stuck forever in an orbit that I would have claimed a month ago never again to need.

Wild words hovered in my throat the moment he looked up and we locked eyes. Words that would ask him if he realized how often I dreamt of him during the winter – that I would wake up some nights with the blanket balled up in my arms. Words that would admit to him I hadn’t been able to come since the last time he touched me – that I was back to the pathetic sock because I couldn’t bring myself to touch the real looking cock he’d given me that one early morning in a cold tent.

Words that would beg him just to forget it all, forget everything we both said. Beg him to call me Ranger one more time, or hold my hand in his – trace the pink line at the top of my ribs with his lips so I could feel the numb skin for just one more night.

I don’t know how long we stood there looking at each other over the bed of the truck. He held my gaze as he spoke, “Thank you for taking me, John.”

I swallowed hard. “Of course.”

He walked away then, slowly moving through the trees towards his cabin. I watched him go, and suddenly a truth flashed through my chest.

I knew, just like I knew the day I was leaving South Dakota for good, that Sherlock Holmes would never sit in the passenger seat of my truck again.

 

\--

 

I saw Lugnut a few days later. 

He flopped over onto his back the moment he saw me across the kennel yard, his tongue rolling out of his mouth while his tail slapped dust clouds in the dirt.

I sank to my knees and buried my face in the fur on his belly while he licked wildly at my forehead. “Look at you, old man,” I said. “Still young enough to show me some tricks when I come by?”

He wiggled more in the dirt, pressing his paws against my face and snarling for me to keep petting him. I laughed, and my lungs seized painfully over the unfamiliar sound, as if they’d forgotten how to do it after so many days without.

I rubbed both of his ears hard with my hands, looking down into the familiar blue-grey eyes. “Should we go for a walk, old Lug?”

He yipped and moved to turn over onto his stomach. I reached out for the leash nearby, dangling it the way I used to do to get him excited to go. I watched him struggle to his feet, so slowly I eventually reached out to pick up his thin hips with my hands.

I attached the leash with a tight throat, and my hands shook so badly it took me three tries to secure the lead. “We’ll walk, old man,” I told him, feeling like I was somehow in a play of my own life – reenacting the past except all the other characters were wrong. “Let’s walk for a bit, huh? You still got time for me, old boy?”

He followed slowly beside me, even as I walked with smaller steps. Every few feet he rubbed his head against my thigh to get another scratch, his tail never staying still even though I could tell he was stiff and limping. We made our way out of the kennels and towards one of the small walking paths nearby – one that lead into a little clearing just behind the offices a half-mile down, surrounded by trees and dotted with wildflowers in the spring.

We used to play fetch in that clearing, years ago when he was still young. I’d pick up any old stick off the ground and he’d sprint after it with all his might, leaping up into the air to catch it before it even hit the ground, then bounding back towards me across the grass, slobber flying. He used to tackle me in that clearing, lay by my side if I still had time to spare after we’d finished our usual walk.

It was where we’d been sitting nearly ten years ago, with his head propped up against my chest and his eyes closed, that day I’d told him the whole story of who I used to be, with only his soft ears and the humming bees nearby to hear it.

I sat with him there for over an hour, massaging his old legs as he stretched and groaned. For the first time in a long time, I didn’t talk to him about anything at all. I just sat, and I held him, and I pretended that I had nothing to say – that everything important had already been said, and I was just a normal human being taking a small break from the world. Just enjoying the feel of the soft sun on my bare cheeks, the way it warmed Lugnut’s fur beneath my palms, and made him smell earthy and rich like fresh wool.

He licked my hand every few minutes, as if he knew I needed a reminder not to succumb to thinking about it all. 

A few minutes in to the short walk back, Lugnut suddenly sat down on the small trail. His back legs were shaking, and he looked up at me with wide eyes and started to cry. The breath left my lungs. I knelt down and took his face in my hands, kissing the top of his snout the way I always did at the end of the walk. His tail was still wagging, soft little swipes through the grass and dirt.

“Tired you out a bit too much, didn’t I?” I asked him. My voice was rough. “Will you forgive me?”

He leaned forward to lick my face. I scooped him up in my arms like he didn’t weigh a thing, and immediately he curled into me and rested his head against my neck. I was more relieved than I’d ever felt in my life when I didn’t run into anyone else on the walk back – as if somehow letting Lugnut be seen having to be carried back on his short walk was something too private, too fragile to be witnessed by anyone else.

I’d planned to take my leave after setting him down near his hut – once I’d held up some water for him and made sure he was staying cool in the shade. I had a long work week coming up – now that I’d gotten Nick to switch my schedule back to the way it was, giving one of Sherlock’s excuses about him wanting to wait for Greg to arrive before going out more in the field. I needed to cook my meals for the week, tidy up the cabin and haul more water. I needed to finish writing up some reports, maybe go for a quick run, do a load of laundry.

Instead I sat next to Lugnut as he napped for a long time, unable even to think about getting in my truck to drive away. I was still there when Molly came around to do the evening feeding. She spotted me immediately, and handed the supplies to one of the junior kennel Rangers to divvy out on their own.

I didn’t smile at her or say hello as she sat down next to me in the dirt, but I knew that she knew she was the only person alive who was welcome to sit there. It was the first time I’d seen her since that dinner at her house, and a wave of relief washed over me when I realized I didn’t regret what I’d told her at all.

Lugnut snored and twitched in his sleep with his head in my lap. I nodded down towards Molly’s flat stomach. “Everything all right in there?” I asked.

She laughed and rolled her eyes. “Only you could make a pregnancy sound like something’s being burned in an oven,” she said.

My cheeks felt hot, and I started to say something different when she put her hand on my leg. “All’s fine down there,” she said, resting her head back against the fence behind us. “Getting a bit nervous about telling him.”

I hummed. “He’s here in a week, yes?”

“Yeah. Next Saturday.”

I traced my fingers along Lugnut’s ears. “I could make it easier for you,” I said. “Just run out the morning of and decorate the whole train platform for him to see. Bring out the whole parade of sled dogs. Huge banners saying ‘Welcome back, dad’ and then in parenthesis underneath say, ‘that’s you, Greg.’”

Molly laughed and put her hand over her mouth, “God, he’d probably shit himself right there in front of the train.”

I grinned. “More like he’d find some other guy named Greg and walk over to congratulate him. Give him one of his classic handshakes and tell him he’s ‘right chuffed for ‘im to be a bloody dad’ even though they just met.”

We giggled for a bit, sharing a small, private smile as Lugnut whined at being woken up. Molly sighed, and I could tell that she was about to say something she’d been rehearsing in her head.

“Have you seen him much?” she asked in a quiet voice.

For a long moment I watched the other Ranger feed the dogs far down the line, scolding them when they jumped up to try and snatch the food from her hands.

I sighed. “Nick rearranged my schedule thinking he was doing me a huge favor – made it so I was driving him around instead of doing the usual patrols.”

Molly groaned. “God, he’s an idiot.”

“More blind than an idiot. He thought the only reason he hadn’t seen us together was my busy work schedule. So, voila, a new schedule.”

Molly twisted her hands in her lap. “So. . . you’ve seen him, then?”

My throat suddenly felt too tight, and I had to force myself not just to lie and tell her no. “Just once,” I said honestly. “I took him out early to drive to one of his sites. Only took him thirty minutes before he was ready to come back, and I haven’t taken him out since. Said he was gonna wait for Greg for the rest of his trips.”

Molly huffed a small, harsh laugh. “So, in other words, it was a disaster.”

I smiled unexpectedly, suddenly fiercely glad that I could share any of this with Molly, as if saying it out loud proved I hadn’t dreamed it all up and gone insane. “It was a disaster,” I agreed. “Him waiting for Greg is just the story we both told Nick to change the schedule back the way it was.” I mirrored her pose, resting my head against the fence. I closed my eyes. “It’s like he’s not even the same person now,” I shrugged. “Sure he’s probably thinking the same thing about me.”

Molly bumped her shoulder against mine. “You’re just the same as ever. Same old handsome, mysterious Ranger, just add extra bags under your eyes and minus the beard.”

I gave a little smile at her joke, but it quickly fell from my face. All I could see in my mind was Sherlock sitting in the truck seat, drowning in his clothes with pale, thin cheeks and red eyes, keeping his feet flat on the floor and saying things like “please.”

I held Lugnut a bit closer. “He doesn’t seem . . . well,” I finally said

Molly nodded. “I agree.”

I turned quickly to look at her and frowned. She blushed under my gaze and cleared her throat. “I, uh. . .” she cleared her throat again, “I saw him recently. Yesterday, actually.”

She shifted to pull her legs into her chest in the dirt, speaking softly like she was sorry I even had to hear the words. “He must have been over on the East side for a meeting or something. I was coming over to take some of the dogs out to train and saw him here – leaning on that fence back there and looking at Lugnut across the yard.”

My heart was hammering in my chest. I wanted to hold Lugnut’s face in my hands and demand he tell me whether he’d seen him – whether he’d talked to him at all – as if Lugnut could tell me the story even better than Molly could. Instead I sat quietly, deathly still, waiting for her to go on.

She did. “I wasn’t going to go up to him. I wasn’t sure if you . . . well, but he looked sort of sad, really. Kinda hunched over the fence. So I asked him if he wanted to go in and say hello to Lug, you know, like he used to do last summer.” Her words were cautious, each one like a soft little apology. “But he . . . he said no thanks.”

I could tell she wasn’t telling me everything. “Yeah?”

She twisted her mouth. “Well, he said no thanks. . . and that ‘Ranger Watson probably wouldn’t appreciate me petting his dog without his permission.’ And then he walked away before I could say anything else.”

I had to shut my eyes again, and all I could see was Lugnut licking Sherlock’s face last summer, lying on top of him in the very same field where we had just been sitting. All I could hear was Sherlock laughing, see him looking over at me. Holding out his hand, saying, “ _Christ, John, save me from your beast of an animal_ ,” even as his smile lit up his face beneath Lugnut’s tongue.

“I think he had his own dog when he was little,” I heard myself say in response. My fingers buried themselves in Lugnut’s fur. “He wasn’t there when it died.”

When Molly left a few minutes later after sitting in a surprisingly easy silence, she leaned back down after brushing the dust from her pants and kissed my forehead, the same way I had done to her countless times before. Her eyes were serious and sad. “I promise you, John,” she said. “I will do everything in my power to make sure you’ll be there.” Her eyes glanced briefly at Lugnut still sleeping in my lap. All I could do was nod with wet eyes after she’d already walked away.

 

\--

 

June bloomed unseasonably hot over the park that year.

Poor Interp was in over their heads dealing with hot and sweating visitors – people wearing only the heavy sweaters they packed and not enough water to stay cool in the hot metal busses on long park tours. I tried to stay as cool as possible in my own truck during my shifts, rolling the windows down to make up for no AC and stopping every thirty minutes to re-wet the washcloth I kept draped around my neck.

Greg arrived in those weeks. I waited for him to approach me eventually with an awkward look on his face, achingly aware of everything that had transpired between me and Sherlock and saying hello only out of some sort of misguided co-worker duty. 

Or the alternative, one that kept me awake at night thinking about like a nightmare, where Greg gripped me by the front of my shirt with a furious look in his eyes. Where he yelled at me, “ _You promised me you’d watch after him, and now he’s a bloody mess all because of you._ ” Where I didn’t have anything to say for myself in response.

Instead he found me the afternoon of his second day back, sprinting towards me where I was on my way to visit Lugnut in the kennels. He picked me up off the ground in a bear hug before I could stop him.

“You bloody wanker!” he cried out. “You knew I was gonna be a fucking dad and didn’t say anything!”

I laughed as he set me down, filled with warmth and relief at the glazed over look in his wide eyes. “You only got here yesterday,” I said. “Not like I kept it a secret for that long.”

He gripped my shoulders again with a ridiculous smile on his face. “Me!” he said, giving me a good shake. “ _Me_ , a dad!”

I reached out to hold his shoulder. “Congratulations,” I said, hoping it sounded as genuine as I felt. He quickly wiped his eyes. “Thanks, mate,” he said. “For that, and for looking out for our Molly.”

“Who says I need to be looked out for?”

Molly appeared out of nowhere behind Greg, giving him a fake scowl. Greg wasn’t even phased. He reached over and picked Molly up in his arms. “A fucking dad!” he yelled out again, before leaning down to kiss her.

The kiss went on long enough for me to take a step away, staring over at the kennels with my hands in my pockets, catching sight of Lugnut suddenly sniff me in the air. His head popped out of his hut, his nose frantically sniffing at the sky while his tail began to wag.

I started to walk over to him when Greg caught my arm. “Sorry bout that,” he said, looking embarrassed.

I nodded over at Molly who was saying hello to one of the dogs. “You both deserve it,” I said, smiling. “I’ve never seen her look so happy – even after her big promotion.”

Greg smiled over at her too, his eyes still a bit wet. “Tell you what, mate, she looked pretty damn close to that happy when she found out you were coming back for this season. Thought maybe she was about to admit she’d been in love with you the whole time.”

I laughed over the sudden rush of emotion in my chest. I rubbed my hand over my mouth. “Yeah, well,” I said. “She doesn’t seem like the unrequited love type.”

Greg chuckled. “That, she’s not.”

He took a deep breath, and I knew it was coming before he even said it. “John,” he said, and my gut churned with sudden anxiety. “I . . . don’t really know what happened, but –”

I held up a gentle hand. “Greg, please,” I said. I swallowed hard. “You don’t have to get into any of that. Or be involved.”

There was a stubborn look about his shoulders, determination in the way he stepped forward to keep speaking. “Molly told me you were . . . well, you know, what happened. And honestly, I should have guessed. I mean, you even told me, sort of, that one day in the car, but . . . I guess I didn't think it was that -- that serious, you know?" He huffed and twisted his mouth, "Christ, I sound like a right bastard, but look. . . John, whatever he did to fuck it up, whatever he said to you, just let me –”

“Please,” I said again. I knew I looked like I was begging. “It’s . . . we can just let it be, alright?” I reached out half heartedly to touch his arm. “You shouldn’t have to get involved. There’s nothing to even get involved with.”

He looked at me for a long moment with an odd expression, as if he was warring with himself whether to let me get away with my blatant lie.

He let me get away with it. “Right,” he said, taking a step back. “Right, well, if you ever want me to smack him upside the head . . .”

I forced myself to smile. “I know where to find you.” I gestured towards Molly. “Go celebrate some more. I’ll go and say hi to Lugnut.”

The last look he gave me before walking away was one I hadn’t really gotten since I was sixteen years old – the first time I ever tried to fully be John out in the world, and the old lady at the corner store two towns over gave me the same look as I asked her in a forcefully deep voice where she kept the pop.

It was pity – enough of it to make my blood run cold.

 

\--

 

The heat meant more sweating, and more sweating meant more showers. Ever since moving to Denali, I’d gotten away with one every two or three days. Many of the Rangers did – the weather during the summer was just mild enough that the usual Visitor Center duty or Enforcement patrols wouldn’t leave you in that bad of shape.

I knew the other Rangers avoided showering out of an odd mixture of environmentalism and laziness – not wanting to trek down from their bunks or cabins to the shower houses, wait for the water to actually heat up, haul all your toiletries and clothes through the outdoors with you.

I avoided showering for entirely different reasons.

I still remembered it like it was yesterday. Even after all those years, even after trying every trick in the book to forget, flipping on the shower head still brought a zip of fear down my spine, a burst of sudden nausea as the memory flashed through my brain.

It happened my second week at Canyonlands, back when my chest still physically ached and the incisions still bled. I’d been making it that whole time on sponge baths alone, telling myself that it was only because I didn’t want to get the recently infected scars wet. Then they took us out on a full day hike during that second week of training, baking in the hot sun and trudging through dirt while we went out to check on some of the more remote trail conditions. 

I’d loved it – being out in the wide open land, the feel of the fresh, new uniform on my limbs, the smell of the hot dirt and the sun baking through my bones. The NPS name tag pinned to my shirt that read “John.” It was still the day I thought about whenever a visitor asked, “So, what made you want to become a Ranger for so long?”

When we got back, every other Ranger ran straight to the shower house, already pulling off their shirts and still laughing from the day. It was different times back then – the girls had their normal stalls for the few of them working in the park, but the younger men – the incoming GS-3’s and 4’s - had a big communal shower space, smack in the center of camp.

I’d disappeared from the group and holed up in my bunk, hating the feel of the dirt and sweat clinging to my skin. I hid inside my sleeping bag when everyone got back from dinner, still fully dressed and hoping they couldn’t smell I hadn’t showered. I pretended to be asleep, outright dead asleep, until the last voices slowly faded away to snores, and the whole camp settled into the silence of the middle of the night.

I crept silently through the dark, clutching my bundle of clean clothes in my arms, letting the moonlight guide my way through the still unfamiliar camp. I kept the lights off in the shower, feeling my way blindly towards the old, wooden benches where I stripped off my clothes and pulled the dirty bandages from my chest.

The hot water felt like heaven. I groaned as it sluiced away the grime from my skin, pounding away at my back, running through my buzzed hair. I stood under the water until it started to run lukewarm. Happiness had burned through me like fresh blood in my veins, and I’d smiled into my hands beneath the spray as I remembered the hike.

And then the door had burst open, and the light flicked on.

It all happened in less than five full seconds. “Shit!” I heard the other Ranger call out, startled that someone had been showering in the dark. I yelled and instinctively covered my face with my hands, brain too startled to think of turning away from full view of the door.

And then I heard, “What the fuck --?” before the door slammed shut again, and the sound of footsteps quickly running away pounded through the walls.

For a moment I just stood there, body frozen under the now freezing water pouring from the shower, and all I could hear was the sound of my own blood pumping in my ears. 

Then everything exploded. 

I slammed off the water and ran to my clothes, slipping on the wet concrete hard enough to fall straight onto my hip. I struggled to my legs, my entire body shaking, and I yanked my clothes over my still soaking wet skin. Without even thinking I ran from the bathroom, hoping and praying that whoever had seen me wasn’t still outside, or on their way back with more people. I sprinted back to the dorm building, clutching my dirty uniform in my hands. I didn’t trust it to try and make my way back to my shared room and bunk. There was a small half-kitchen at the far end of the hall, a sink that no one used and an old rickety table and chair. I crept silently down the hall and slipped inside, shutting the door behind me and triple checking that it was locked.

I sank down against the door to the cold floor in the dark. My heart was screaming painfully where it pulsed behind my ribs, and my limbs shook out of control. I could hear myself breathing, panting shallowly in my chest, and I covered my mouth with my hands to try and muffle the sound.

And then, for the first time since I was ten-years-old, I started to cry. The entire force of what had just happened hit me all at once, slapping me across the face and punching the air from my chest. Full, fat, hot tears dripped down my face, over the half-stubble that covered my cheeks. I tried to stay quiet, hoping the gasping sobs escaping from my throat couldn’t be heard through the walls.

Desperate ideas flashed through my mind all at once: I could try to seek out who it was who’d seen me and beg them to stay silent; I could suck it up and tell the head Ranger before someone else told him and got me fired; I could take it all back, reverse everything, grow out my hair and throw away the rest of my shots and change the name tag pinned to my shirt. 

Anything to keep the uniform I was still clutching in my hands. Anything to stay in the Park Service, to stay a Ranger, to _stay_.

I stayed in that room all night, never falling asleep on the hard floor. The spot on my hip where I’d fallen turned a deep, angry purple. I waited until I heard the first stirrings of my fellow Rangers waking up, then I crept down the hallway and back to my room, pretending that I had just come from a fresh shower that morning. The other Rangers in my room didn’t say anything at all, just nodded at me – their shy, silent roommate who never talked – before going back to joking each other on their way to grab breakfast. I waited until they were all gone before changing into a fresh uniform, moving my nametag to the clean shirt with shaking hands – realizing that I hadn’t gotten a chance to fully wash my skin from the day before.

In the breakfast hall, most of the other new Rangers were crowded around one table.

“John, you gotta hear this!” one of my roommates called when I walked in late. I forced myself to walk towards the group, feeling like a man facing down a loaded gun. One of the other new Rangers, Robbie, was telling a story to the rapt crowd.

“. . .and then, now that the light is on, I see it’s not a dude showering in the fucking dark at all. It was a fucking girl, using our bathroom!”

The whole group gasped and laughed. I wanted to sink into the ground and die, waiting for him to point through the crowd straight at my face.

“You catch sight of her tits?” someone called out.

“Who was it?”

Robbie shook his head. “Couldn't see any tits, happened so fast. She covered her face with her hands the second I walked in. Hair must’ve been up in some sort of bun thing.”

Someone else spoke up, “But you must have seen . . .”

Robbie smirked. “Oh yeah, _full_ view of her pussy.”

Someone in the group whistled, and a few of them cheered. I thought I was going to pass out.

“Come on, who do you think it was?”

“Yeah, come on, Rob, spill!”

He savored the moment, waiting until everyone was silent. “Honestly,” he said, with that same smirk on his lips, “I don’t have a clue. But I’ll tell you that the hair down there was ginger as all hell –"

“The hell’s going on over here?”

One of the older Rangers – George, I thought his name was - was pushing through the small crowd. Robbie sat up straighter. “Just telling the boys here about a special visitor to our bathroom late last night.”

George gave him a glare. “If you’ve got something to report, it comes to us, not your whole goddamn audience in the middle of breakfast,” he practically commanded.

When Robbie rose to follow him away from the crowd, I waited for him to seek out my face and call out my name. For him to say, “ _Oh, I’ve got something to report, alright,_ ” then point between my legs.

But he didn’t. Robbie followed George back towards the table of head Rangers, and the rest of the crowd of GS-3’s and 4’s slowly dispersed to eat their toast, and I didn’t realize I’d been standing frozen until my roommate tapped my shoulder.

“What, John, you just see a ghost? Come on and eat,” he said.

For the next two years, until I worked my way up to GS-5 and got my own shared cabin and shower, I only showered in the middle of the night and with my underwear still on.

Midway through that warm June in Denali, after a full day of sweat-soaked patrols, I stood under the hot spray and did my usual routine. Washed out my hair, did a quick pass with a bar of soap under my arms, relived that entire vivid memory as I splashed water between my legs.

I got dressed in my sweatpants and an old shirt sleeve shirt, already sweating again once the fabric touched my damp skin. After a moment of indecision, I tied my towel around my waist over my pants before heading out towards the sinks to brush my teeth. Chris and Nathan were standing by the sink with their shirts off, Nathan telling Chris a story of a visitor moose encounter from earlier that day while Chris shaved.

He stopped mid-story when they saw me come out of the stall. “Hiya, John,” he said. I smiled as they shifted over to make room for me at the sink. “Another moose chase?” I asked.

Nathan smiled. “Oh, yeah. Visitor tried to take a goddamn photo right in its face outside the Tent – took three of us just to calm the poor guy down afterwards. Chase weaved in and out of practically every bus parked there in the lot.” 

I chuckled as I started to brush my teeth, thinking they would go back to their own conversation.

Nathan bumped my shoulder. “So, what’s the deal with you not driving our favorite Brit around anymore? You win a bet this year to get out of it?”

My chest froze. I leaned over to spit and shrugged, mouth still half-full of toothpaste. “Just different schedules this season, I guess,” I said, going back to brushing my teeth.

Nathan looked over at Chris. “Man isn’t quite so uptight this year, you notice that? Not got all of his fancy clothes and suits with him anymore.”

Chris laughed. “Always wanted to ask him if he fucking asked for his Ranger uniform to be three sizes too small. Was wondering when those buttons on his shirt would finally give out – Tony and I had a bet going.”

Nathan grinned. “Well, that’s how all of them dress, isn’t it? You know . . . clothes all tight.”

Before I could stop myself, I asked around my toothbrush, “Who, the Brits?”

Chris gave me an odd look. “No, man, the gays.” When I froze, he went on, “Come on, Watson, don’t tell me you didn’t have the suspicion before. The amount of hair product he uses?”

“And that cologne, god.”

They both laughed together, as if it was the most casual joke in the world. I forced myself to grin, too, waiting until I finished rinsing my mouth to speak. “Must not have really thought about it, I guess,” I finally said, looking down at my spit slowly running down the sink drain.

Chris smiled warmly at me. “Well, John, that’s because you’ve been living as a hermit for so long.”

Nathan gently put his hand on my back. “Gotta get you out in the real world every once in a while – see how us normal people live while you’re in your cave.”

It was an old Toklat joke – one that mainly started about six years ago when my coworkers all realized I hadn’t seen a new movie in about a decade. It had never bothered me before – I almost wore it as some private badge of honor whenever it came up.

Now, though, the words seeped under my skin like sharp ice.

I forced myself to laugh along with the familiar joke as I made my way towards the door. “Good luck with that one, guys” I said. “Molly’s been trying for years.” 

They both gave me warm smiles as they waved me out the door, immediately continuing their conversation about the moose once I left.

I didn’t realize I was shaking until I closed my cabin door behind me.

I couldn’t sleep. I spent the night pacing aimlessly around my cabin – roving from the kitchen to the bedroom and back. I’d tried to read, tried to cook, tried to lie on the couch and stare at the ceiling and think through old memories out in the backcountry, or with Lugnut.

Instead I thought about how it had been three and a half weeks since I’d seen Sherlock Holmes.

Past midnight I found myself sitting at the small kitchen table, holding a cup of cold tea in my hands and staring down at the surface with bloodshot eyes, tracing the grain of the old wood by the light of a candle I’d lit in the corner – something Molly had given me a few years ago that she claimed was specially scented to help you relax.

I wanted to relax. I wanted to forget about every word Chris and Nathan had said in the bathroom. I wanted to fall into bed blissfully, not even aware of how another body would fit by my side. I just wanted to sleep.

I startled out of my thoughts by a soft knock at the door. 

An alarm flared in the back of my mind. Instantly I thought of a million different possibilities: It was Nick saying Sherlock Holmes told him some secrets about last summer; it was Chris or Nathan asking me why my laugh hadn’t been fully genuine at their jokes; it was Hannah come to invite me to another social activity I was about to miss; It was Molly, sweet Molly, telling me it had happened without me there.

I rose to stand on my socked feet. “Just a sec,” I called out. I rushed quietly into my bedroom and opened the bedside drawer, knowing the way my sweatpants fit around my thighs would make it painfully obvious if it wasn’t there. I took an extra second to adjust everything before walking back towards the door, palm already sweating as I reached to turn it open.

Sherlock Holmes was standing on my porch in the dim light of the stars. I froze and stared at him, wildly wishing that time would freeze so I could look at him as long as I needed – memorize every line of his face and shoulders to prove to myself that he was really there.

The cold air from outside was seeping into my cabin, and still I couldn’t move. He was wearing pajama bottoms and a worn Henley tee, with his old favorite dressing gown wrapped tightly around his thin shoulders. He was shivering a bit in the cold.

“You can’t sleep,” he said quietly. 

I shook my head. “No.”

He kept looking at my face, as if the rest of my body didn’t even exist. Far off in the distance a wolf howl echoed over the hills. 

“May I come in?” he finally asked.

In a flash I remembered a moment from nearly a year ago – when I had woken up to Sherlock already in my cabin in the door to my room. He’d been fully dressed and wild and taking up every speck of oxygen in the air, demanding that I wake up and drive him as if he hadn’t just picked the lock on my door.

He hadn’t stood there shivering on the porch, asking politely to be let in.

I wanted to say no. Shut the door gently, go back into my kitchen, grab the bottle of Scotch I’d only ever opened twice before, down a few gulps so I could fade away into sleep.

Instead I moved back into the kitchen to let him pass. “Sure.”

He kicked off his shoes on the porch then shuffled inside on bare feet. I nodded at the kitchen table for him to sit down, then moved on instinct towards the stove to set water boiling. I couldn’t sit down and face him and breathe his same air – not yet. I felt him waiting silently behind me as I forced myself to make tea, berating myself for being a stupid, sentimental fool that I’d kept the leftover bags from the box of tea he’d had shipped here from London midway through last summer.

I dropped a bag of herbal mint tea – another gift from Molly – into my own mug and carried the two back to the table. He reached out immediately to warm his hands on his mug when I placed it in front of him. I noticed his fingers were blue and shaking, and I suddenly wondered how long he’d stood outside my door before bringing himself to knock.

We both stared at our tea for a while, neither of us taking a sip.

“Sorry, don’t have any powdered milk for that,” I finally said, hating how loud and grating my voice sounded in the silent cabin.

His mouth quirked at the corner even though the smile didn’t reach his eyes. “At least you still have this for me and not that horrible mint sludge.”

I breathed through my nose, but neither of us laughed.

Eventually he started sipping at the overly steeped tea in his hands. We sat there for a long time while we both drank, neither of us breaking the silence or even fidgeting in our seats. It was almost peaceful – the way the darkness flickered by the light of the lone candle. I forbid myself from watching it paint warmth across his face.

Finally, just when I thought that maybe he wouldn’t speak at all, Sherlock set his half-empty cup down on the table and folded his hands. He stared down at his fingers and twisted his mouth.

“John,” he said softly, as if he was too exhausted to speak at a normal volume. I held my breath waiting to hear what he would say. He shifted in the chair, causing the wood to creak, and then he reached down into the pocket of his pants beneath his robe. He slowly placed a half-full plastic bag on the table between us, pushing it towards my hands.

“I need . . .,” he paused and licked his dry lips, meeting my gaze for a moment before looking back down at the bag. “I need you to take this,” he said. “Please.”

I realized all at once what was within the plastic bag. I reached out and moved some of the contents around just to make sure. White powder and a syringe. Sterile gloves and extra needles.

The oxygen in the air seemed to crumble – turning into black tar that pushed down upon my limbs, turning the entire earth heavy and dark until I couldn’t see or hear a thing.

I looked back up at him, but his gaze was still down at his hands. The drugs sat between us like a screaming siren in the dark. He was still shivering.

“Sherlock,” I said gently, not having any idea how I was going to finish that sentence. I sat up straighter in my chair and tried to meet his eyes. “Listen to me, I can’t take this.” My voice sounded pathetic and weak in my own ears. “I’m a government employee,” I went on. “If anyone were to find this . . . if there were a search. . . I’d lose my job instantly. I’d be arrested.”

An odd tremor wracked through Sherlock’s limbs, causing him to twitch and his fingernails to dig into the table. I thought he was going to continue staring blankly at the table forever. But then he sat up straight and quickly cleared his throat – the way he used to do before delivering some genius speech.

“Right, of course, you’re right,” he said. His voice was a bit too quick and high. He reached out and took hold of the bag again, sliding it back towards him. “I should have realized – would have realized, if I had just thought about it for a moment. Stupid of me, really. I shouldn’t have asked.”

Something about the mad look in his eyes, the way his hands still shook, the odd tone of his voice . . .

I leaned forward across the table and forced him to look at me. “Are you . . .” I waited until he stopped trying to look away. “Sherlock, did you take some already?”

I could see his swallow moving down his throat. His grey eyes were shining and glazed over in the light from the candle. “A few hours ago,” he finally whispered.

An emotion rushed through me, punching the air from my lungs. I ran my hand over my forehead. “Fuck, Sherlock, seriously?” Anger burned in my chest – anger and a fresh wave of something that felt a lot like guilt. “You’ve been clean for _years_. Fuck, what did you –”

I resisted the sudden black urge to reach out and grab him by the front of his robe. I shook my head and tried to speak over my choked voice. Fury burned in my fingertips and underneath my tongue. “What the fuck were you thinking,” I whispered. “What could have . . . honestly, what the hell possessed you to even – how did you even get your hands on this? Are you sure this is even safe? Seriously, what the fuck happened?”

He sat there silently while my words poisoned the air between us. Guilt slapped my face as each word left my mouth, and still I couldn’t stop, couldn’t close my lips against the anger in my gut. My chest was heaving when I finished, and I collapsed back exhausted into the stiff wooden chair. Suddenly, more than anything, I wanted to close my eyes and fall asleep.

His breathing was shallow while he still looked down at his hands. I wanted to shake him and kiss him, yell at him and apologize to him all in the same moment.

He was silent for a long time. The minutes ticked by like hours on the clock above the stove, loud like bombs dropping in the middle of the dark kitchen. I felt like complete shit for just yelling at him – drowning him in anger when I should have been wrapping a blanket around his shoulders, leading him to the couch so he could sleep, holding his hand.

I was about to start apologizing when he finally took in a sharp breath to speak. “I didn’t mean to,” he whispered. His voice was thick and wet. “I didn’t . . . I just needed to . . .” His eyes searched through the thin air, as if the right words were hovering before his face, but moving too fast for him to read. Then he silently reached his hand back out across the table, slowly reaching out his fingers and giving me time to pull away.

I left my hand where it was. His cold, thin fingers wrapped gently around mine, barely holding on and still shaking against my skin. We both looked at our joined hands in the light from the candle. I clenched my jaw hard. It took everything in me not to bring his palm up to my mouth – to kiss the lines of his hand, the pads of his fingers. To hold it up to my own cheek so his fingers would become warm.

Instead I let him hold me for almost a full minute before I slowly pulled my hand away, leaving his fingers clutching at the air on top of the table. 

He sucked in a sudden breath and snatched his hand back. He blinked hard, and a single tear fell down his cheek. He didn’t wipe it away.

“I shouldn’t have come here,” he said quickly.

I had no idea whether he meant my cabin or Denali. Something told me he meant both. I could feel him itching to leave, and suddenly my way forward became clear. I reached out and grabbed the plastic bag before he could stuff it back into his pocket.

“Let me take care of this,” I said. He looked at me for a long moment before slowly nodding his head, sitting back in his chair and letting me pull the bag away. I put it down in my lap where he couldn’t see before placing my hands back up on the table.

His eyes traced the lines of my fingers. “You know,” he said, after another long stretch of silence. His voice sounded too thin. “Some nights I still wake up and reach for you beside me. I’m completely positive that you’ll be there. There isn’t any doubt in my mind. And then . . . when the sheets are cold. . .” He paused to lick his lips. “Sometimes it takes me a whole hour to realize you aren’t coming back to bed.”

His words pierced me in my chest, leaving a deep and throbbing ache. My eyes prickled with hot water before I quickly blinked it away. I wanted to tell him that I reached for him beside me _every_ night, not just sometimes. That some days I got so lost in my own head in my truck that I started talking to the passenger seat before I remembered it was empty.

Then our words from that day last August echoed in my mind – hoarse and piercing through the vast, empty valley from where we stood high up on the peak.

“ _So, what, you just looked around and picked the most broken Ranger you could find?_ ” I’d yelled out. “ _Someone to fix as your summer project so you wouldn’t get too bored between finding your fucking wolves?_ ”

And he’d looked at me with confused and frustrated eyes and screamed back, “ _Yes! Are you honestly saying you would have been happier if I’d left you alone?_ ”

His face now across the kitchen table in the flickering light of the dying candle looked the same way it had just moments after those words – when he had rushed to me and held out his hands as I was quickly backing away. “ _John, believe me, I didn’t mean it like that._ ” he’d begged me. “ _You know that’s not at all what I meant._ ”

I took a deep breath, knowing he was frozen in his chair waiting for me to answer – to tell him that I still reached for him in the middle of the long nights, too. I looked at him with heavy eyes. “It isn’t . . . we just aren’t like that anymore, Sherlock,” I said with a forced calm. “We’ve both moved on –”

“Why?” he suddenly said. “Why do we both have to move on?”

I opened my mouth to answer him, but he went on in a rushing voice. “You aren’t sleeping, you’re too thin, I’m both of those things and apparently back to doing fucking cocaine. Neither of us is happier apart than we were together. It’s completely illogical why we can’t be like that anymore.” He suddenly stood up with a harsh scrape of the wooden chair and grabbed hold of his hair, pacing across the kitchen. “I don’t understand this, John– I’m back. I’m _here_ , we’re both in the same place. Neither of us is happy. So why won’t you . . . it doesn’t make any sense that we’re not – why can’t we just _try_ \--”

“I never asked for any of this,” I said back, rising to my own feet. Pain churned hotly in my throat until it almost felt like anger. “I didn’t ask for you to come back. I _was_ moving on. I was coming back to my job, to my life, and I was fucking fine until you made the decision for both of us that it was somehow okay for you to show up here –”

“You were hiding away in the Grand Canyon all winter, not ‘doing fine’ –"

“Well, excuse me for not wanting to spend all winter alone in a cabin which I had been planning to ask you to fucking move in to with me –”

“How can you say that now? How in the world is it fair for you to say that now when you didn’t even tell me that before --?”

“Probably because you were too busy telling me your fucking genius plan where I quit my job forever and moved all the way to fucking London!”

“But I came _back_!”

I blinked hard, and suddenly we were both panting and glaring across the kitchen. His last words still echoed against the wooden walls, and I wondered how loud we’d been screaming, and for how long.

His hands were shaking so badly that it made the rest of his arms and chest shake, too. We stared at each other in the screaming silence for another few seconds before he sucked in breath.

“I should never have come here,” he said again, all in a rush, and before I could decide whether to stop him he was moving quickly towards the door, flinging open the handle with his still-shaking hand and disappearing out into the darkness without even putting on his shoes.

“Sherlock –” I tried to call out, but my voice came out as a breathless whisper. I couldn’t watch him walk away. I quickly pulled the door shut and stepped back into the center of the kitchen, staring blindly at my feet in the dark while I fought to get my lungs to work again.

Out of the chaos in my brain, I suddenly remembered one thing with perfect clarity: the drugs. I rushed over to the table, achingly relieved for something productive to do with my hands. I scooped up the bag and brought it over to the sink, dumping the white powder down the drain and washing it away with the leftover water in the tea kettle. Like a robot I grabbed the rest of the contents in the bag and walked quickly in my bedroom, leaving the light off as I flung open the closet door and shoved them up onto the top shelf. I would deal with them tomorrow – figure out how the hell to get rid of it all.

As I was pulling my hands away from the shelf, my fingers brushed something unfamiliar and soft. I frowned, reaching back up to pull down whatever it was to get a good look. The fabric felt luxurious in my hands – like expensive cashmere. I started to walk over to the bedroom light to flick it on so I could see, but then I caught a whiff of what was in my hands, and I suddenly remembered what it was.

It was his scarf – the deep blue one he’d brought on that first backpacking trip last year. I’d made fun of him for bringing something so fancy out into the backcountry where it could get lost. He’d instantly reached over and stuffed it into my pack before I could stop him, telling me that now I would be the one to blame if his favorite scarf went missing.

And all the rest of that summer, he’d never once asked for it back.

I desperately wanted to hold it up to my cheek and mouth – to breathe in the leftover scent of him still hovering in the fabric. Instead I set it down on my bed without another glance while I went about the rest of my routine – cleaning up the tea in the kitchen, running out to the bathroom, preparing for the next day of work, setting out my clothes.

A long time later, even though my alarm was due to go off in only two more hours, I finally slid between my sheets with stinging, heavy eyes. I didn’t think about anything at all as I bundled up the scarf in my hands. 

And I didn’t breathe through my nose as I drifted off to sleep with the cashmere pressed to my cheek.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Does it help at all if I tell you that the next chapter is SO HAPPY? Seriously, it's so happy. It's 1991 and it's bursting with rainbows and everyone is giddy and smiling and Lugnut gets belly rubs. Thanks for trusting me with the angst in the meantime.
> 
> As always I'm truly grateful for the positive response this fic is getting! To all of you who have reached out to share your love of this setting and characters, I owe you such deep gratitude. I'm still enjoying the hell out of writing this fic, and hopefully the next (super happy) 1991 chapter will be up very soon!
> 
> Your comments are the fire fueling my muses with this fic, and your kudos are like Lugnut's favorite dog treats suddenly raining down on him from the sky. Thank you for reading!


	8. Late June 1991

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bluegrass: Listen to Hazel Dickens and Ginny Hawker sing "Old River" [HERE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBIqqRvJWzQ&list=PLPMbOXH7TtSSP7T1xoR7TQW8TY62_qhSJ&index=7/).
> 
> Sarah Jarosz: listen to "Green Lights" [HERE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1gPUlO70O8/). Try to watch that music video and *not* fall in love with Sarah. I dare you.
> 
> I know this chapter took a bit longer to get out than normal - I found it surprisingly difficult to get back into "happy 1991" mode after all of the 1992 angst the last chapter. Thank you so much for your patience and enthusiasm! I hope you enjoy :)
> 
> **There is a super brief (literally one sentence) moment in this chapter that contains a homophobic slur. It comes up when Sherlock mentions John's parents. Additionally, this chapter contains more animal death from a distance.

Late June 1991

Nick found me one bright, clear morning in the head offices on the East side. I’d been hunched over a desk for hours finishing off reports from the last month, reminding myself with each scribbled signature why I never in my life wanted to be promoted up the ladder any higher than I already was. Only a few hours inside and I was already itching to get out – my skin claustrophobic and stiff and the back of my neck aching for the bright sun.

A firm hand clapped to my shoulder from behind. “Jesus, Watson, I don’t think I’ve seen you stay indoors this long in years – even when it poured rain a few years ago half that season.”

I leaned back in the stiff wooden chair and groaned, rubbing my hands over my eyes before stretching my arms behind my head. “And you wonder why I won’t let you switch me to Interp?” I asked. “Stand inside at a desk and point to maps all day?”

Nick laughed up at the ceiling before coming around to perch himself up on the desk with one hip. “Listen to me, anyone ever tries to suggest you do Interp, even just one shift in the Tent, I’ll ask them how they’d like to deal with the hundreds of complaint letters.” He held up his hands as if he was flipping through and reading forms. “Ranger talked to the moose outside before answering our question. Ranger said ‘I don’t know, just walk out there and figure it out’ when we asked him which direction to hike. Ranger could not be found anywhere in the immediate vicinity of the Visitor Center.”

I laughed and winked at him while I reached up to scratch at my beard over my jaw. “Sounds about right to me,” I said. “Honestly don’t see the problem.”

He grinned and nodded down at the stack of forms on the desk. “Those all the aftermath of that Alpine Hike the other day?”

I groaned and rubbed at my forehead. “These aren’t even half the forms I’ve had to fill out,” I said, shaking my head, and Nick winced in sympathy.

It had happened three days before – one of the worst accidents the park had seen in years. Young guy on the guided Ranger Alpine Hike outside Eielson had figured he would try and impress the girl he was with, standing at the very edge of the outcropping of boulders at the peak and leaning back to get a good photo. He’d fallen, of course, almost twenty feet down, landing just a foot away from a soft patch of moss and getting bashed on a cluster of gnarled brush and mid-size rocks instead.

I’d gotten the radio call about it when Sherlock and I were nearby at Stony Dome – spending more time making each other laugh with fake bear calls than actually looking for signs of any recent wolf activity along the Road. It was the first time Sherlock had ever been with me when I’d gotten a medical call. He’d gone instantly into another mode, rushing back to the truck on my heels and staying perfectly silent on the fast drive to Eielson, anticipating exactly what supplies I needed him to grab from the truck when we got there before I even asked.

We’d jogged up most of the mile-long trail together, thighs aching towards the top and both of us completely out of breath. It hadn’t even occurred to me to suggest that Sherlock had no reason for following me up – no reason on earth to scramble behind me up one thousand feet of elevation gain just to stand back and watch me fix a broken leg.

But he’d followed me, and I didn’t try to stop him at all.

One of the Eielson Interp Rangers with EMT training was already crouched down and tending to the man just below the peak. His leg was completely shattered – bone sticking out and blood covering the steep slope. His girlfriend was still screaming and sobbing at the top even though it had been almost thirty minutes since the initial fall. Down at the base of the trail I could see more Rangers starting to head up with heavier supplies, navigating the stretcher up the steep, switch-back trail.

My mind had instantly switched over to my training, utterly focused on nothing except the broken leg in front of me. There was clothing to cut away, blood to staunch, fractures to set right and splint, a patient to calm. I only ever used my training less than a handful of times each season, and yet every time, my body flipped into gear as if I’d been doing it every day – as if every bone in my body was singing to the tune of the chaos beneath my hands, the chaos that was cleared away bit by bit as my fingers danced over the exposed muscle and bone.

I had been utterly absorbed. 

And yet, I had also been keenly aware of Sherlock standing just behind me, handing me what I needed from my medical bag before I even asked – wordlessly placing gauze and medical tape and a splint in my outstretched hand. His eyes had burned at the back of my neck, and the knowledge of his steady gaze made me shiver even under the bright sun. I felt that every puff of breeze on the wind was really the breath from his own mouth – that the sun baking down onto my back was really the warmth of his own hands.

It had taken me only about fifteen minutes to get the patient stable enough for transport, by which time the stretcher and extra supplies had made it up the steep trail. I leaned over the poor guy who was trying not to cry, half-high on the pain medication I’d slipped him and groaning in pain.

“You’ll be alright, bud,” I said. “Just some crutches for a few months, is all. It’ll all be good as new.”

He’d tried to reach for my hand, words slurring while a jumbled ‘thanks’ came out of his mouth. I moved to stand back and bumped smack into Sherlock leaning down over my shoulder.

“And she’ll say yes when you ask her to marry you if you accept that promotion at your job,” he said quickly. “She wants to know that you’ll be stable and provide for the both of you, and to be able to afford the larger apartment in the center of town.” 

The main frowned and looked up at him, squinting against the glare of the sun. “How --?”

I looked over my shoulder. “Sherlock, what the hell –”

“And she disapproves of your hair dyed that color – let it go back to natural and her ‘yes’ is practically assured.”

The man’s eyes kept falling shut as the other Rangers hoisted the stretcher into the air. “You’re my guardian angel,” he barely mumbled at Sherlock as they started to hike down, the still crying girlfriend following close at their heels once they rejoined with the main trail.

I nodded and raised a hand at the other Rangers as they started to head down, knowing I wasn’t needed for any more help beyond that point. Visitors were still gathered in a huge crowd up at the peak and along the trail, watching the scene with wide, shocked eyes the way you’d watch a car on fire in the middle of the road. I knew that they’d probably been fixated on every one of my movements for the past half hour – soaking up every detail of the scene for the stories they would tell back home. Even after my colleagues had started carrying the visitor back down the trail, more than thirty pairs of eyes had been steadfastly fixed on me.

But I wasn’t looking back at any of them.

Sherlock was standing five feet in front of me, eyes fixed on my face. My gloved hands were covered in blood. I reached up to wipe the sweat from my forehead with my arm beneath my rolled-up uniform shirt, still kneeling in the grass with my supplies scattered around me on the terrain. Everything felt like it was moving too slowly, trudging through a foggy, thick mud, after the burst of focused action I’d just had to perform.

I squinted up at Sherlock. “How the fuck did you know all that?” I asked him, quietly so no one else could hear. “His proposal and his job? The new apartment?” I knew I was failing at keeping the stupid grin off my face.

He stared at me without smiling back, and I could feel his eyes slowly tracking down my throat towards my chest. He was panting, and something about the look in his eyes made my stomach feel tight and hot.

“I just looked closely at what was in front of me,” he finally said in a low voice. A single bead of sweat was dripping down the side of his neck, rolling away from the damp curls nestled behind his ear. Part of his uniform shirt had become untucked from his pants, and the tiniest sliver of bare skin on his hip was peeking out just above his belt.

And suddenly, out of nowhere, I wondered what it would feel like to press my nose into the sweaty curls, to lap up that single bead of sweat with my tongue. How warm his skin would be at that place over his hip if I were to press just the pad of my thumb to his bare skin.

And kneeling there in the grass, in front of a whole crowd of people, I suddenly ached between my legs. I was wet, and I could feel a bead of it dripping down into my boxers.

We stared at each other for a long moment, neither of us saying a word. The entire rest of the earth fell away as I looked back into his eyes – deep grey and heavy, with a focus in them I’d seen directed at me only once before – that moment out in the backcountry, after I’d shoved an extra compass in the pocket of his pants, right before he’d moaned at the back of his throat, right before I’d felt the hard length of him pressed up against me, right before I’d felt that forbidden shiver of want up my own spine.

Fingers were snapping in front of my face. I blinked hard and shook my head. Nick was leaning towards me across the desk with his hand in front of my eyes.

“Did you just go and die on me for thirty seconds, Watson?” he asked while laughing.

I cleared my throat and shifted to sit up straight in my chair, eternally grateful that my beard was probably covering most of the blush on my cheeks. There was a fresh damp spot on my boxers between my legs, and I shifted again so I couldn’t feel the wetness against my bare skin.

I forced myself to smile and gently shook my head. “Sorry, Nick. Damn paperwork must have put me into a coma.”

Nick huffed. “Don’t blame ya.” He shifted back onto the desk, wrapping his fingers around his knee. “Now, anyways, speaking of getting you back outside. . .” he paused and pulled at his long beard while squinting up at the ceiling. “Got a bit of a project for you,” he said.

I folded my hands in my lap and nodded up at him. “Go on.”

“See,” he tilted his head. “Our wolf team’s gotta check up on some collar data much farther out from the Road than they’ve been looking – Lestrade tells me way back into Unit 29 up to the base of Igloo at least, and then some potential knew activity – pack territories changing, or something like that, he said– about a three full day hike back into Unit 23 through Unit 9.”

I nodded slowly and frowned, not seeing his point yet. “Ok. . .”

“See now, Lestrade and the kids are checking out on that lead they got up near Igloo. Take them about two and a half days, I reckon, if they make good time on the way back out of the valley.”

My palms started to sweat. “Right. . .”

“And Holmes. . .” Nick sat up straighter from his perch on the desk and cleared his throat. “Well, Watson, I’ll just tell it straight. Lestrade told me the beginning of this summer that Holmes would do all his field-work himself. But now it looks like Holmes has refused to go out into the backcountry to research the site in twenty-three unless you go with him. Lestrade came and told it to me this morning before my rounds.”

I waited for myself to feel irritated or annoyed – for weariness to wash over me at the thought of having to tag along behind a researcher on a multi-day trek, or for self-pity to rise up in my chest, the need to ask, “Why not someone else?”

Instead a bright burst of unexpected joy settled just under my lungs. I could feel my fingers twitch. I wanted to leap up from the desk, drive back to Toklat, and bang on Sherlock’s door asking him if we could just leave right now.

Nick was looking at me with a cautiously hopeful expression – clearly wondering if the fact he’d rarely seen me and Sherlock apart the past month meant I’d be ok with this sudden unexpected assignment.

I took a deep breath and nodded down at my hands. “Okay,” I said.

Nick leaned forward. “Really?”

I shrugged, hoping he couldn’t feel the excitement already buzzing through my limbs. “Sure. I mean, bit unconventional for a researcher to drag an Enforcement Ranger along with them for field work, but . . . if you have the manpower to spare me for a few days, I wouldn’t say no to a quick trip out to those glaciers. Been years since I’ve been back there in twenty-three.”

Nick’s face lit up. He reached out to grab me by the shoulder. “Man, Watson, you’re a saint,” he said. “God knows why, but it seems you’re the only person in three hundred miles who can even handle the guy.”

A weird mix of defensiveness and pride settled in my chest. I moved to stand up, shuffling the completed reports from the desk into my hands. “Must have the special touch for it,” I said down at the desk. “Got years of practice from dealing with all them grizzlies – all of you wimps calling me to deal with them whenever they wander too close to Toklat.”

Nick barked out a laugh with his hands on his hips. “Tell you what, Watson, that Brit scares me more than any Denali grizzlies ever have. Man told me yesterday that the fish I ate for dinner the night before had gone bad – no fucking clue how he ever knew I ate fish in the first place. But, don’t you know it, last night I was sick something awful for hours.”

I held back the huge smile threatening the corners of my lips and ran my hand over the back of my neck as I followed Nick out of the office. “Yeah, he can say weird shit like that sometimes,” is all I said after him.

Nick spoke over his shoulder as he turned to go down one of the other halls. “You got next Monday through Thursday to make sure he doesn’t get killed out there,” he said. “And go ahead and bring me a backcountry report while you’re at it – something I can pass on to the Backcountry office to save them a patrol trip.”

I called back, “Got it,” and waited for the sound of Nick’s footsteps to disappear. I stood still for a moment in the middle of the empty hallway. I stared at my feet – my old work boots covered in a day’s worth of dirt.

Nick’s words echoed in my mind, “ _Holmes has refused to go out unless you go with him_.” My fingers twitched by my side – remembering the feel of Sherlock’s hand beneath my own, that evening almost a month back when we’d watched the caribou travel over the Road, and we’d somehow said everything without saying anything at all. 

I made a quick detour once I got outside over to the kennels, knowing that Lugnut would immediately notice the stupid grin lighting up my face.

 

\--

 

Two days later, I decided I was going to kill Sherlock Holmes myself before we ever even made it out into the backcountry.

I leaned down over my kitchen table with my hands on the rough wood. Open topo maps and pencils were scattered over the surface, and my floor and couch were littered with all of my backpacking gear spread out to be packed.

I bent my head. “Sherlock, for the last fucking time, you need to bring _food_ ,” I said. I heard him huff from where he was standing with his arms crossed in the door to my room, leaning against the doorframe casually while he scowled over all my supplies.

“It’s absolutely ridiculous to bring food when you’re already demanding on bringing all of this nonsense,” he said. He flung his hand out towards the mess. “A sleeping pad?” he cried. “A portable stove? Really? Honestly, and everyone makes you out to be the ultimate ‘man of the land’.”

I groaned and turned away to set some water boiling on the stove. “That tundra beneath the tent will freeze your ass off without that sleeping pad – so no whining to me when you wake up in the mornings and your fucking ass is a block of ice.”

He huffed again.

“And if you wanna go three days out there without a single hot thing to eat or drink, be my guest.” I got down a fresh scoop of coffee and started to crank the handle on my grinder. “You saw what happened the last time you woke me up without coffee,” I said over the sound of the grinding beans. “You really wanna be around that person for four days straight out in the wilderness?”

Sherlock sighed and reached out to flick at my pair of shoe spikes with his socked toe. 

“This is the definition of unnecessary,” he said under his breath. “I’ve gone more than four days before without having to eat – there’s absolutely no reason why I should have to lug it around with me now –”

“Oh really, and that other time, you were also strenuously hiking for miles?”

He gave me a sharp look and put his hands on his hips. “No,” he said. “That other time I was strenuously hiking for _kilometers_.”

I raised my eyebrows and turned back to the boiled water to make my coffee. “Jesus Christ, I’m gonna kill you before the bears even get the chance,” I muttered.

I practically felt his answering glare behind me. “You’re hardly the first Ranger to threaten with me with that, and I doubt you’ll be the last. And yet, here I am. Fully intact.”

A laugh burst out of me before I could stop it. “I’m not the first Ranger to threaten to murder you, then?” I asked. I heaped a spoonful of sugar into the second cup of coffee without even thinking about it, by then so used to making an extra cup for him that sometimes, on my days off where I was alone in my cabin, I still got down two mugs before realizing I only needed one.

He mumbled something under his breath, too low for me to hear it.

I turned and handed him his cup of sweet coffee, curling my toes in my socks when his fingers brushed against mine for a second too long.

“What’d you say?” I asked.

He sighed up at the ceiling, a big dramatic yawn. “I _said_ you’re almost as irritating as the Ranger who banned me from Yellowstone.”

I choked on my swallow of coffee and struggled to breathe as I coughed. “You’ve been _banned_ from Yellowstone?” 

He rolled his eyes. “Utterly ridiculous and unnecessary. Why have a park filled to the brim with geysers and then _not_ allow anyone – a scientist, most of all – to get close enough to take a sample for further testing –”

I could barely breathe I was laughing so hard – huge, breathless laughs that squeezed in my gut and made water brim over in my eyes. I wiped my forearm over my face and tried to pull myself together. The mental image of Sherlock Holmes being scolded after trying to dash towards the geysers was threatening to make me lose it all again.

When I did look up, Sherlock was staring at me out of the corner of his eye. His eyes were bright, and the corner of his lip was twitching, and I realized all in a rush that he had told that story just to make me laugh. That knowledge did something to the air in the room as we both stood there holding our mugs and staring down at the mess of all my gear – turning it private and muffled against the world and prickling over my skin.

I finally looked away when the moment turned too heavy, moving back to the maps on the table and leaning over them again. I spoke down at my hands. “You know, if all of this really is too much for you – not your usual method of going out there – I could tell Nick you decided to go on your own –”

“You’re coming with me,” he interrupted. He said the words casually to the wall of my cabin and took a quick sip of coffee after. I wanted to put my foot down and ask him a million questions – ask him _why_ , and why he always did field work alone in the past, and why he didn’t move away from my hand while we watched the caribou, and why he rode all day in my truck, and why _me_.

Instead I nodded. “Right. Okay.” I stared at him across the room. “If I’m coming with you, then, you’re bringing food.”

His shoulders sagged as he sighed. “I’ll bring two days’ worth,” he said.

“Five days, in case our trip extends –”

“Fine, three.”

“Four.”

“Three and a half.”

“ _Four_ , Sherlock.”

“That weight in my pack could be used for eighty-four other potential things, should I provide you with the list?”

“Is starvation one of the things on the list?”

“Three and a half plus one extra snack.”

“Four, or I swear I’m not going.”

He huffed and stomped his foot. “Of _course_ you’re going. Implying that you would back out now after I’ve explicitly requested your presence over something as ridiculous as the amount of food –”

“You wanna try me?” My words came out deep and rougher than I expected. The air changed. An odd tension hovered between us across the room, and I thought I heard the slightest intake of his breath as his arms twitched. Suddenly, out of nowhere, I wanted to feel him let out that gasp of air against the skin of my own neck, in the small shadow beneath my jaw.

I cleared my throat to ease the air, shifting to stand upright and crossing my arms over my chest. I felt self-conscious - embarrassed – as if my hands had somehow just smashed the warm light that had been between us and smothered it away.

I waited for what felt like hours – waiting for him to argue some more, or tell me to go fuck myself for thinking it was okay to boss him around, or ask me why the hell my voice had sounded like I was about to pin him to the ground. My palms were sweating.

Finally he looked over at me. My fingers tingled in relief when I saw he wasn’t angry. There was mild irritation in his eyes, and something like teasing, but more than anything, there was that same odd softness I’d seen him look at me with sometimes in my truck, at the end of a long day checking wolf sites and doing patrols, where I would roll down the windows and push in a tape, and as I navigated us through the endless stretches of tundra at dusk back to Toklat, I would feel his eyes flickering to the side of my face more than the distant mountain peaks beyond.

“Looks like I don’t have a choice, then, do I?” he said softly, then added, “Ranger.”

I nodded, even as a strange warmth wound up my spine. “Deal,” I said back, so quietly I could barely hear myself, and he lifted his coffee in agreement before taking another sip.

 

\--

 

We set off on the earliest camper bus heading East, hefting our huge packs into the back before grabbing two spots on the worn leather seats. Sherlock sat just in front of me on the nearly empty bus, pulling down the window a few inches so the air rushed in and ruffled his hair. 

It was just past six in the morning, and I’d been awoken right at five to the sound of Sherlock loudly declaring, “Where’s my coffee?” at the foot of my bed in the dark. I’d slept that night in a long sleeve shirt in case that exact situation occurred. And then, even when I knew that Sherlock Holmes was standing at the foot of my bed, I’d groaned at him, and cursed under my breath, and then slipped out from between my sheets and padded into the kitchen in my shirt and boxers. And I’d been fully aware that there was nothing between my legs that time, and my chest had grown oddly warm at the fact that I hadn’t felt any fear.

Sherlock had stood behind me, silently watching me make his coffee without any words at all. I’d dressed, and we’d gathered up our packs while hardly exchanging more than two words. The walk out to the Road felt muffled and private, as we passed by sleepy cabins and took soft steps on the crunching gravel. For the first time in a very long time, as reached the Road to catch the bus, the sock in my boxers hadn’t felt like it was rubbing my skin raw.

I’d planned to use the bus ride out to go over our preferred route again in my head – plan for any unexpected complications on our path, triple check we had all of our supplies, mentally plan where we might want to stop and camp each night.

Instead I watched the wind in his curls for the whole hour-long drive to Unit 9, wondering idly in the back of my mind what those curls would feel like against my fingers – wound softly in the space between my thumb and my palm, or trailed across my cheek, or held gently between my lips.

We grabbed our packs when the beginnings of Unit 9 came into view and signaled the bus driver to let us off near one of the less steep drainages down the face of the slope. He nodded at us silently and waved as we stepped off. I’d ridden his early morning bus headed East probably more than fifty times, and still to that day I didn’t even know his name.

Sherlock and I didn’t talk at all besides giving our bear calls as we climbed down the slope, forcing our packs through thick, dense brush and hacking away at branches as we slid down the rough dirt and dried up moss. It took nearly half an hour to get all the way to the bottom, by which time my thighs were already shaking with exhaustion and my cheek was bleeding from a cut by a sharp branch.

Sherlock didn’t look any better than I did – his curls were branching all directions and half-filled with leaves, and the whole left side of his body was streaked with dirt after he’d lost his balance on a loose log and fallen sideways into the deepest part of the drainage. 

He waited for me at the bottom, out in a clear part of dry river rock where we could easily scan for any wildlife. He shifted his pack higher on his shoulders and sneered at the slope behind us, uselessly trying to brush the dirt and mud from his clothes.

“Yes, excellent route, Ranger,” he called out as I walked over. “I love feeling like I’ve been hiking for hours when it’s only been thirty minutes.”

I huffed and gestured to the thin line of the Road. “You see anywhere else that looks less steep where we could have climbed down?”

“Well _you’re_ the one who insisted on us starting in this Unit. A few miles back there were plenty of easy flat connections with the Road.”

I gaped at him and laughed. “The whole reason we’re even in Unit 9 is because you’ve insisted on getting to 23, and this is the quickest way through!”

He huffed again and brushed more stray twigs from the arms of his jacket rather than answer me. The early morning wind was still icy and sharp, and I shivered as it sliced across the back of my neck. 

Suddenly, standing there watching Sherlock try to set himself to rights, something warm and soft came over me, protecting me from the cold air. Without thinking, I reached out with my own hand and wound my fingers into his curls, slowly pulling out a few of the leaves one by one.

His curls were softer than I had ever imagined back in the bus, trailing across my fingers like a velvet, silken moss.

He froze, and I realized what I was doing with horrible thud in my chest. My eyes grew wide, and fear burned in my gut. I moved to snatch my hand back, already starting to mumble an apology, when Sherlock silently shook his head, and instead leaned gently into my palm. 

He held my gaze for a breathless moment. “Thank you,” he said. He nudged his head against my fingers for me to continue getting the leaves, and, after holding my breath for a few more seconds, I finally did, watching my rough fingers weave through the dark strands and knowing that his eyes were on my face the whole time.

I nodded when I was finished, and we started to follow our planned route, walking along the river bed as far back into the Unit as we could until wildlife or water forced us to get to higher ground. Our steps sounded hesitant, as if neither one of us wanted to actually take the lead. My fingers prickled where I had touched him, and I fought against the urge to wipe my hand off on my pants.

After a few minutes of walking side by side, with only the sound of our boots crunching against the dry rocks, Sherlock reached into his pocket and drew out a handful of fabric. I watched him out of the corner of my eye as he unfolded a blue scarf, lifting his chin so he could fit it around his neck. I did a double take.

“Is that . . . did you bring a cashmere scarf on a backpacking trip?”

Sherlock shot me a glance out of the corner of his eye. “I brought my _only_ scarf on a backpacking trip where, according to you, I’ll ‘freeze my ass off’.”

I shook my head and laughed. “Don’t come and yell at me when that thing gets damaged or lost,” I said. I kept walking, but soon I realized that he had stopped behind me. I turned and looked back over my shoulder, already aching a bit at the weight of my pack on my back.

I raised my eyebrow at him. Sherlock gave me an odd look. “I’m not going to lose it or ruin it,” he suddenly said, as if he’d just come to a grand conclusion he felt the need to announce. 

I frowned. “Okay. . .”

He quickly walked towards me, pulling the scarf off his neck in one movement. Before I could stop him he reached for my pack, undoing one of the zippers and shoving the scarf inside. “You’re going to keep it safe for me,” he said.

I tried to yank my pack away from his hands. “Wait a fucking second – now you’re not even going to wear it?”

He closed up the zipper with a forceful yank and stepped back, immediately starting to walk ahead again through the river rock. He looked back at me and gestured his hands. “Well, seeing as how you were so _concerned_ over its welfare,” he said with a little bow. “Now you can focus on more important things like making sure we don’t get eaten by bears, or die of starvation with our four days’ worth of food.”

I jogged to catch up to him and shoved him aside. “You’re an asshole,” I said, laughing. 

The look he gave me as we fell into step together was one that I couldn’t bring myself to look away from, even though it burned down my neck like warm water. It looked like safety – the first full breath I took after I crossed the border out of South Dakota. It looked like the first time I ever wrapped a strip of tight cotton around my chest.

The first time I ever put on my uniform. The first time I was called “sir.”

It looked like two hands resting together on top of a truck roof, neither one moving away long after the wind had grown cold.

 

\--

 

That first day passed by in one smooth blur. 

I never would have thought in a million years that backpacking with someone else could be so enjoyable – almost indistinguishable from being alone, except there was someone to nod agreement when I pointed out a new route. Someone to call out “pair of moose north-east,” before I’d even spotted them grazing through the tundra myself.

It was like every other time that summer we’d headed off into the wilderness, leaving the Road and my truck at our backs and walking until we couldn’t see another soul in sight. Except that day, an odd thrum beat down the length of my legs that we weren’t going to return to the truck by the end of the day. We weren’t going to retrace our steps and leave the wilderness behind us. Weren’t going to part ways in the gravel lot at Toklat right before I headed to my cabin to eat a silent dinner alone – the same way my dinners had looked nearly every night for the last twenty years, and yet that day, as we walked to the beat of each other’s steps, I suddenly ached in my chest at the thought of looking up at my kitchen table to an empty chair.

We barely talked during that day once we got in the rhythm of our hike. We followed the riverbed back into the land for miles – occasionally having to cut new paths up onto the plateaus on either side, bush-whacking or crossing thick tundra to avoid river forks or wildlife. Sherlock would stop every hour or so to investigate some site or another, but he never ran off, and every time he stood up from inspecting a spot of ground, he’d give me that same soft look again when he nodded that he was ready to keep going.

By the time the sun was hanging heavy in the sky, threatening to spill down the slopes of the glaciers even though we still had a few hours of summer daylight left, we’d covered almost ten miles back along the river fork. My feet were starting to ache, and my shoulders felt raw beneath my pack. I cleared my throat as I scanned for a good open place to camp.

“Should stop near here for the night,” I said to Sherlock’s back. “We can cross into twenty-three tomorrow about mid-morning. Should make good time if we rest.”

He nodded silently and immediately dropped his pack to the ground where he stood. It took us only half an hour to get the tent set up. Without any speaking at all, Sherlock found the best spots for our bear can and our cook site while I unrolled the sleeping pad and bags inside the tent. The tent was nestled at the bottom of a steep green slope, protected from the wind with good visibility stretching the other direction across the river bed. I changed into a warmer jacket and my extra pair of shoes before joining Sherlock at the cook site, where he was aimlessly whittling at a piece of wood with his arms around his knees.

I boiled water over my little stove and dropped some of my mint tea into two metal cups before passing him one. He took a sip and immediately sprayed it out over the tundra.

“Christ, did you just boil a clump of moss and call it tea?”

It was the first words he’d said to me in well over an hour. I laughed and shook my head, getting out the oatmeal, granola, and peanut butter we would have for dinner. 

“What, anything that’s not fucking loose leaf ‘bergamot earl grey’ too lowly for your tastes?” 

He huffed. “You make me out to sound like some rich, aristocratic snob,” he muttered.

I looked at him. “Well, aren’t you?” When he frowned I quickly added, “Rich?” 

I thought of his suit that first day – of that insane phone he’d been using, the fact he’d gotten tapes shipped out to him so quickly, the delicate smell of his cologne.

He shrugged and looked back out across the tundra, slowly warming under the setting sun like a golden mist sea. “My family are rich,” he said softly. “I assure you, there’s quite a difference.”

I felt like I’d just been offered the key to a room – one I’d stared at from afar for weeks but never dared try to enter. I took a deep breath and tried to keep my voice sounding casual. “So. . . you’re not close with them?”

He huffed out a single laugh and flashed me a quick look. “About as close with them as I expect you are with your own parents,” he said.

Immediately the last words from my dad flashed through my mind, as clear as if they were being screamed out through the deep valleys at our backs. “ _No daughter of mine’ll be a faggot under my own roof while I’m still alive,_ ” he’d cursed, then he’d shot his gun once up into the air as I sprinted down the two-mile long dirt road towards town, the fresh buzz cut I’d given myself that morning rubbing raw beneath my hat.

I wanted to tell Sherlock that I doubted his relationship with his parents was anything like that, but instead I asked the question I’d been dying to ask since day one.

“Why wolves?” I said. When he was silent, I went on. “I mean. . . you look like you should be in some university tower somewhere, studying, I don’t know . . . chemistry.” I traced the long line of his neck out of the corner of my eye. “How’d you end up all the way in the middle of Nowhere, Alaska tracking wolves?”

He was silent for a long time. Long enough that we’d both started to eat bites of oatmeal in the thickening evening air, the swirls of steam rising up to join the gathering cool mist. I’d never felt so comfortable with another person’s silence before – so relaxed just to sit back and wait instead of dreading whatever they were about to say. Finally, he set down the tin bowl in his hands on a nearby rock and ran his fingers through his hair.

“Wolves are interesting,” he said, so softly I had to slow my breathing to be able to hear him. Then he smiled, “I _was_ studying chemistry at Cambridge,” he said. “Everything you’re probably imagining, fancy suits and old wooden buildings and all that.” 

His grey eyes slowly scanned the distance as he talked, but I couldn’t look away from the sharp line of his jaw. He spoke as if the words were unfamiliar on his lips – carefully forming each sound, like little puffs of fragile air. He went on carefully, “The week before I was set to graduate – I was graduating two years early –”

I chuckled. “Of course you were.”

He bumped my arm and flashed me a fake glare. “Anyways,” he went on, “One week before the end of term, I found myself . . . Well, I had a bit of a rough night.” He clenched his jaw, blinking hard as if he was fighting with himself to keep talking. I leaned closer to him in the cool grass, shoulders barely touching. He nodded once, as if he’d just made some internal decision. “I woke up outdoors, in a little area of woods near the campus. Middle of the night, it was freezing. I just remember looking up at the stars through the branches of the trees.”

I frowned, suddenly unable to picture the man beside me passed out in the middle of the woods in the dark. “Celebrated so hard that night you just drank yourself into falling asleep outside?” I asked him, trying to lighten the mood.

He didn’t smile, and an odd tension crept into his voice. “Something like that,” he said. Something pulled at my chest, an ache to know more, but I let it drop, leaning in to him again and softly saying, “Then?”

He nodded. “Well, once I realized what was going on, I saw I’d woken up to something licking my face, and then an enormous wolf laid down with me, right by my side. Stayed there the whole night while I drifted in and out. It was probably the only thing that kept me from freezing there in the dirt.”

I glanced at him. “Hold on, I _know_ you know there aren’t any wolves in England.”

The corner of his mouth twitched up, and his eyes glowed as he looked my way. “Correct,” he said. “About three whole days later I realized it must have been someone at the university’s enormous pet dog. It had even been wearing a collar, but . . . I wasn’t with it enough to put it all together.”

I laughed and leaned back on my hands into the grass. “But you thought it was a wolf,” I said.

He smiled. “I thought it was a wolf.” He cleared his throat. “Next morning I spent hours in the library reading everything I could about them. Their nature and their habitat – the way their packs move and hunt. They were _interesting_. I hadn’t been interested in anything in . . years. So. . .” He shrugged and held up his hands. “I packed up my stuff and left. Never even sat for my last week of exams.”

I gaped at him. “You just left?”

He hummed. “I begged around for a bit trying to get my foot in the research door. Finally someone introduced me to Gavin –“

“ _Greg_.”

“George. He was in the middle of a PhD on wolf behavior – I told him my tracking ideas and he was the first person not to tell me I was verifiably insane. Now here we are.”

I whistled low under my teeth, trying to absorb all of the information. “Here we are,” I repeated. I licked my lips. “So, your family . . .”

He smirked. “Absolutely furious I’d ‘tarnished the family name’. Practically disowned me on the spot when I left. Cut me off from everything. My insufferable older brother is the only member of the family who still insists on knowing my whereabouts. Works in the government. Practically _is_ the government, actually. It’s disgusting how much he loves holding the strings behind the scenes.”

“That fancy phone,” I said, realization dawning. “The quick packages.”

Sherlock scowled but tilted his head. “He does have his occasional uses.”

The wind was picking up, and I moved to start gathering up the supplies from our dinner. “So, wolves still interest you all these years later?” I asked down at my hands.

When he didn’t answer immediately, I paused and looked over at him. He was looking straight at me – that same expression I’d seen on his face just after I’d tended to the guy on the Alpine Hike.

He held my gaze. “For a long time they were the _only_ thing that was interesting,” he said, and the tone of his voice tore the breath clear out of my lungs. I stared back at him, feeling like I’d die if I looked away. His eyes were so clear – deep blue and piercing grey. I suddenly wanted them to see my bare skin below my clothes – to trace the lines of my ribs, and understand every inch of the scars along my chest. I wanted him to look at me like I was just as interesting as a speck of wolf fur hidden in the grass. I wanted him to _look_.

I looked away after a long moment, rubbing my hand over the back of my neck. “Lucky us that you’re still interested,” I said lamely. “The research you guys are doing would have taken another team years.”

He was still staring at me. When he spoke again, it was if I hadn’t said anything at all. “Nobody’s ever asked me that,” he said. “About the wolves – but you asked me why.”

I shrugged, still gathering up our things so I wouldn’t have to look up into his eyes. “Guess no one’s ever put up with you long enough to start to wonder why,” I said.

I felt his gaze burning down my spine as he watched me shove the last of our supplies into my bag, slamming the bear can lid shut and brushing the dirt from my legs. Finally, he simply hummed, then quickly stood to help me make sure the site was clear. He walked so close to my side that our arms brushed together as we trudged back towards the tent. I didn’t step away.

I yanked off my jeans and pulled on long underwear over my boxers once we were inside the tent. I left in the sock. He dressed facing the other way, pulling on a thick thermal sweater and socks. I got silently into my sleeping bag, taking time to adjust my layers and the zipper so I would stay warm, then I scooted to the side, giving him half the sleeping pad to use.

He looked down at the empty space, then reached down to pull his own bag closer to the other side of the tent. I frowned as he scooted away.

“Got half the sleeping pad cleared for you,” I said, as if he hadn’t just looked down and seen it.

He spoke over the rustling of his clothes as he crawled inside his bag. “Pointless. We’re much better off if we each have enough room than if we’re smashed together.”

I watched him struggle to set his sleeping bag to rights. “You’re gonna freeze,” I said. “That tundra’ll freeze your ass right through the bottom of the tent.”

He huffed as he settled down, facing the other direction. “I’m perfectly fine in my layers. I will not freeze.” He said the word ‘freeze’ as if the word itself had personally offended him.

I curled up in my sleeping bag, listening to the sounds of the earth settling just outside the tent. “Suit yourself,” I said.

I didn’t fall asleep for a long time after that. I stayed wide awake, blinking through the slowly gathering darkness until the summer sun finally set around midnight. I stared at the long line of his back through the sleeping bag against the tent. I watched him shiver, and I knew that he was also awake. The sound of our breaths mixed together in the humid air of the tent.

And I wanted to reach across the foot and a half of space between us and grab onto his arm. I wanted to pull him closer to my body so he would be warm. But I didn’t.

 

\--

 

I woke up early in the morning with the full dawn sun, stretching in my sleeping bag and rubbing the exposed parts of my face that were freezing cold. I dressed inside my bag, pulling back on my worn jeans and a thick jacket to stay warm. Sherlock was dead asleep as I stepped over him and walked out of the tent. Only the top of his forehead and his curls poked out from inside his sleeping bag.

The air outside was sharp and clear. I breathed in a deep lungful of the morning mist, feeling it settle like heavy, clean water through my bones. The earth was fragile and still – like a painting on thin silk that would tear and break if I made too loud a noise. I smiled as I watched a young caribou bound across a hill far off in the distance. Its little ears pierced the sky as its hooves danced through the swirling fog. I watched him until he finally disappeared out of sight, then I splashed some freezing water on my face and through my hair to wake up.

I was already crouching by our cook site and boiling water for our coffee when I heard Sherlock’s footsteps shuffle up behind me. He plopped down with his sleeping bag still wrapped around him and wordlessly held out a hand.

“Not ready yet,” I said, nodding down at the coffee. His hand stayed out. “Don’t care,” he mumbled.

I shrugged and poured some of the hot water into a mug and placed it in his outstretched hand. He gulped it down immediately, wincing as the hot water burned down his throat.

I stared at him as he tossed the empty mug down into the grass and shivered in his bag. “Your throat still intact after that?” I asked him.

He burrowed deeper into the bag. “I wouldn’t have needed it if you had picked a place to camp that was actually warm,” he muttered.

I laughed up at the sky then began to pour my own cup of instant coffee. The rich smell instantly filled the thick, foggy air. “I told you so,” I said as I held my own cup up to my face and inhaled. “If you don’t wanna freeze your ass off tonight, you can just share the sleeping pad like a normal person.”

He mumbled something I couldn’t make out as he continued to shiver by my side. His curls were wild, poking out in every direction from the top of his head, and there were lines under his eyes and on his cheeks from where the fabric of his sleeping bag had creased his face. 

I shook my head at him and laughed again, handing over my own cup of coffee so he could take a sip. I suddenly had the feeling that I was the first human on earth to see him like this – still sleep soft and ruffled, his mind not yet blazing sharp.

“I promise I won’t let you freeze tonight,” I told him gently. I watched him gulp down the rest of my coffee even though I’d only gotten one sip.

He looked at me quickly as he handed back the empty cup. “I’ll hold you to that, Ranger,” he said, and the gaze we shared went on for a moment too long.

The rest of that day passed much like the one before. We packed up camp quickly and headed up one of the nearby slopes, trying to gain higher ground based on some pawprints Sherlock had spotted late the previous day. Again, we barely talked, and again, our footsteps fell into a rhythm beside each other. Sherlock stopped much more frequently that day – getting out his magnifying glass and ruler as he crawled across the ground and muttered to himself under his breath. I spent half the day just watching him, sprawling in the nearby grass, lazily scanning the horizon for any bears but mostly watching the curve of the back of his long neck.

That night, as we once again climbed inside the tent to sleep, there was an odd tension buzzing in the claustrophobic air– one that hadn’t been there at all the night before. I was achingly aware of his every move as he pulled on his warmer clothes to sleep – the bend of his knees as he slipped on his socks and the way his lean chest twisted as he adjusted his thick sweater over his arms. I tried not to stare at him as I settled into my own sleeping bag, moving to the side so I only took up half the sleeping pad beneath me. My breathing felt dangerously loud in my ears, taking up the entirety of the small tent and filling it with the sound of my lungs. I watched Sherlock carefully slip into his own bag, slowly, as if he was trying to make the simple process take hours.

When his legs were fully inside, he stayed sitting upright in the tent. He looked down at me, eyes flickering quickly over the empty space by my side. I felt that I was about to make a decision that would rumble in the core of the earth – that would cause the mountains outside to either rise to the heavens or crumble to ash.

I looked up at him, and I nodded.

He scooted close to my side, lying down so the full lengths of our bodies were pressed together within our bags. For a long time, there was just silence. My body trembled at the places where we touched, as if his skin was pure fire seeping straight into my skin beneath my clothes. I could smell him – the mix of a day’s worth of sweat and damp dirt, the earthy moss of the tundra that had baked under the sun on the skin of his hands.

I was shocked when I felt myself start to drift off to sleep. I’d expected to lie awake the entire night with my heart beating, terrified that somehow Sherlock’s hand would slip inside my sleeping bag and _know_. That I would wake up to find him gone, or wake up to learn I had clung to him in my sleep.

Just when I was almost pulled under to the soft lull of his breathing, Sherlock spoke in a whisper, staring up at the tent ceiling.

“That night I told you about yesterday,” he said. “The night I woke up in the woods. . .”

His quiet voice filled every inch of the tent, draping over my body like an extra layer of warmth. He was silent for a long time, and I didn’t dare to move or speak. He shifted closer to me, just barely, and I didn’t move away.

I heard him lick his lips. “I wasn’t drunk,” he said. “I’m a drug addict. I was high on cocaine.”

The air shattered. I felt the shards of it piercing into my lungs, piece by piece. I hoped that I hadn’t made a noise of pain at the sensation, that Sherlock didn’t know that my throat was choking as I imagined him cold in the woods and alone. His spine was ramrod straight beside me, and I could feel the tension in his muscles like blocks of ice.

I forced myself to speak. “Are you still on it?” I asked, hoping my voice sounded steady and clear.

“No,” he said quickly. “I’ve been clean for twelve years.”

Relief clenched in my chest, so fiercely that I felt my eyes prickle with water. I didn’t know what to say. I scooted closer to him, until my toes to my chest were pressed against his tense side. I let my cheek rest on the thick sweater covering his shoulder. It rasped softly against my beard.

“You won’t be cold tonight,” I finally said. He exhaled a long sigh, and I felt the tension immediately leave his body. He relaxed his spine, curling up his legs so he fitted perfectly alongside me.

“I’ll hold you to that, Ranger,” he whispered back, right as I was on the cusp of falling asleep. And later, through my dreams, as I floated endlessly on a vast warm sea, I thought I heard more words whispered warmly against my ear – so clear it felt impossible that they were only a dream and not real.

“ _Thank you,_ ” I heard, and I felt soft curls trail over every inch of my naked skin.

\--

I woke up feeling heavy and warm. The sun was just starting to rise, pouring through the thin walls of the tent and illuminating the specks of pollen floating in the air. Condensation dripped thickly down the thin canvas sides, and a splash of humid air fell softly onto my cheek.

And I realized, all at once, that Sherlock’s arm was wrapped tightly around my waist. He was pressed up against my back, curled completely around my body. I felt his puffs of warm breath against the back of my neck, and a lock of his curls brushed against my ear, and his knees molded into the space behind my own through the thick layers of our bags. 

I waited and blinked for what felt like hours, terrified to move out of fear that it was real but desperate to prove to myself that none of it was a dream. A bird sang in the distance, greeting the morning air. I heard the soft pads of hooves crunching through the tundra outside the tent – knowing from years of listening that it was just a caribou and not a bear. 

Sherlock shifted in his sleep, and his arm pulled me closer. I sucked in a breath as it dawned on me that all of it was very, very real. 

I waited for the rush of panic – for my muscles to tense up and my mind to scream at me to run. For my hands to start shaking, and my breath to wheeze. 

And instead all I wanted was to make the layers between us disappear. I wanted to feel the hairs on his forearm brush against the skin of my stomach, and to feel how his thighs would twitch against mine. I wanted him to taste my skin and kiss the hair on my face in the morning cold.

I wanted, like I’d never wanted anything like that before in my life, and I also knew, with an aching thud, that I would never, ever have it. That the moment his hand traveled down the hair on my stomach, the moment he reached between my thighs, that it would be over.

I knew that my clothes and sleeping bag were probably too thick for him to be able to feel that there was too much empty space beneath my boxers, the same way I couldn’t feel the line of his cock pressed into my lower back. I knew that when he woke up he would probably whip his hand away – apologize and blame it all on the cold, then move on with the day. Pretend that nothing happened, maybe cut our trip a day short. Tell me it was all a misunderstanding, and that he may be gay, but not for me. Not for a beat-up Ranger who lived in the middle of nowhere and kept his thoughts to himself – who’d spent more nights in his life waking up next to his dog than next to another human being.

I knew I just had that one chance, that one moment to wake up in his arms. A few blissful minutes where I could pretend before it all disappeared into smoke.

So I took that chance, grabbing onto it fiercely with both hands.

I sighed through my nose, and I let myself press back against the warmth along his front, relaxing into the line of his body until I imagined I could feel the muscles of his chest against my back. I shifted my head until his lips were right behind my ear, breathing hot air against the exposed skin on the side of my neck.

He was so warm. It felt like melting into a bed of soft grass – like getting home from a long day of hiking and standing under the spray of a hot shower. It felt like every bone in my body was correct, like the morning I’d woken up on a hard, thin cot in the middle of New York City and seen myself in a mirror for the very first time with a flat chest.

I shut my eyes tightly, and I tasted the air, and I just breathed.

He sucked in a quick breath behind me. His hand twitched on my waist, then quickly lifted up into the air. He was awake.

I froze.

Everything I had planned to say – all of the apologies and the quick words – the way I’d been planning to just sit up and brush it off, start rolling up my sleeping bag while hoping he wouldn’t be too angry – suddenly, I couldn’t do any of it. 

I waited, holding my breath and keeping every bone of my body straight and still. There was an inch of space between our bodies where there hadn’t been before, and the backs of my thighs felt empty and cold at the absence. 

I waited, feeling dread pump through my veins like heavy blood. Then, like the first breeze of spring through the window of my cabin in Talkeetna, he suddenly sighed against my neck, and his arm wrapped once more around my waist, and he pulled me back against him in one smooth motion.

My throat closed up. I squeezed my eyes shut and focused on his heartbeat against my back, imagining the soft thuds even though I couldn’t really feel them. We stayed that way for a long time, huddled together in the pocket of warmth – long after the sun had fully risen, and the dawn outside had slipped into day.

Right when I was finally about to break the silence and say we should get going, his thumb brushed softly against the front of my thick shirt.

“You kept your promise, Ranger,” he whispered. His voice was rough and low.

My heart raced. “What was that?” 

He pulled me even closer to himself, and I felt the press of his cold nose rubbing against my neck. “I wasn’t cold at all,” he said, and he held me for one more moment before slowly sliding his hand away.

“Should start if we want to reach all the research sites,” he said, and I ignored the ache of disappointment in my chest as I nodded, sitting up without looking at him to start getting ready to pack up the tent.

We didn’t speak again until I was pouring out our morning coffee, high up on a bluff where we’d pitched our tent that night. I was looking out over the endless, rolling tundra, watching the mist hover above the tops of the small trees, swirling around the mountain peaks before fading into the purple air.

Sherlock came up beside me and I handed him his mug. He took a long sip, standing close enough that our shoulders touched. 

“I’ve seen a lot of your national parks,” he finally said, speaking out at the far distance. He took another sip. “But this one is by far the most beautiful.”

I wanted to turn to him and press my cheek into the warm crook of his neck. Instead I took my own sip of coffee, trying to hide the fact my fingers were shaking. “I agree,” was all I said, but I felt like I was saying so much more.

That third day was different, and it was also entirely the same. It wasn’t awkward or tense, and it wasn’t bright and new either. It was the same as every other time I’d walked beside Sherlock Holmes through Denali, and yet every second of that day, I also knew what his body felt like when he was asleep. I knew how his chest fitted behind mine, and the exact weight of his arm across my waist.

I knew he hadn’t pulled away.

That third night, when we crawled into our tent after a full day of research near the foot of the glaciers, there was a slow softness to his movements which I’d never seen before. He settled down beside me before I was even fully in my sleeping bag. The sound of his sigh washed over me like a dream. 

And that night, I was the one who wrapped my arm around his waist. Who pressed my cheek against his neck, and felt the warmth of his spine against my chest. We didn’t zip up our sleeping bags, some silent agreement to lay them on top of us like a large blanket instead. I actually felt his heartbeat against my palm through his sweater. I felt his thighs twitch as they settled against mine. I held him, as if the simple weight of my arm could keep the rest of the world away – as if the press of my arm against the curves of his hip bone was the most intimate act any man had ever performed.

And I wasn’t wearing the sock beneath my long underwear and my boxers. And I didn’t move away when he eventually pressed his hips back against mine.

“You warm enough?” I finally asked him, needing to say something just to prove to myself that it was real.

He nodded, making it so his curls brushed across my face. Then he reached up to place his palm on the skin of my wrist across his stomach, pushing up the sleeve of my shirt so he could touch the bare skin. 

\--

When I woke up in the morning, he was gone.

I flung out my arm to double check that the space next to me was really empty. His sleeping bag was freezing, and his shoes and socks were missing from where he’d placed them the night before.

I swallowed hard over a dry throat. “Sherlock?” I called out. My voice was barely audible, so I cleared it and tried again. “Sherlock? You outside?”

There was no answer. Not even a ruffle in the grass to let me know he was nearby. I felt the area next to me again – it was far too cold for him having just gone near the cook site to pee. I somehow couldn’t imagine that he would be up cooking breakfast – as if the day before had established some sort of understanding that that morning we were meant to wake up together again, with him in my arms.

But he was gone.

Panic shattered through my body. My skin went numb. I leapt up to my feet without even thinking and yanked on my jeans before shoving my feet into my boots. I opened the tent so quickly I nearly ripped the zipper. I scanned across the horizon once I was outside, trying to see through the fog my breath was creating.

“Sherlock!” I called out again, and still no answer. He wasn’t by our bear can or the cook site – nowhere in the vast horizon was there a hint of long legs or dark curls. I cursed under my breath and started running in a random direction, sprinting faster than I could remember doing in a long time. The wrongness of it all settled like poison in my blood. My heart raced, faster than my lungs could even keep up. 

I ran up a nearby slope towards the bluff, scrambling up loose rocks to try and reach the peak to get a better look. My tongue was numb and dry as I cupped my hands around my mouth and called his name again. All I heard in response was the echo of my own voice back. I wildly scanned the peaks and valleys of the glaciers surrounding me, desperately hoping to catch a glimpse of him – praying with clenched hands that he wasn’t lost somewhere or hurt – that he hadn’t decided to do something stupid like start off without me or his pack. That he hadn’t woken up with my arm around him, holding him close, and pressed back against my body, and suddenly realized that I was all wrong. That he hadn’t really meant for those nights to happen. That he needed to leave.

There was movement out of the corner of my eye, about a half-mile away down the steep side of a bushy drainage. I nearly moaned out loud with relief. Sherlock was crouching in the brush, slowly trying to climb his way up the loose rock. My body relaxed in a great sigh. I could walk out to him and yell at him for going on a stupid morning hike by himself. I could take his hand and lead him back to our camp site and make him his coffee and everything would be right.

Then I saw what he was creeping towards. 

An enormous male grizzly stood at the peak of the steep drainage, pawing at a lump of fur on the ground and sniffing it with its nose. Even from that far away, I could tell it was a dead wolf. And Sherlock was trying to climb directly towards the grizzly who hadn’t yet realized he was just twenty feet away.

My heart leapt in my throat. I started sprinting wildly in his direction down the slope, realizing in the back of my mind that I’d left my bear spray and all my supplies behind. I tripped and fell hard on a thick, stiff branch, tumbling a few feet down some gravel and tearing my jeans at the knee. I didn’t even realize I had fully fallen until I was already back up on my feet and running, madly trying to throw together a plan in my mind. Sherlock was still slowly making his way up the slope, moving underneath the layer of brush while the bear started to tear apart the carcass with its teeth. I could see the blood seeping into the tundra around its feet.

When I was about two hundred feet away, I crawled up onto a boulder, trying to make myself visible above the thick brush of the clearing. I couldn’t feel my body, and my blood roared in my ears. Without thinking I cupped my hands around my mouth and started to scream.

“I’m human!” I called out. I waved my arms above my head and jumped up and down. “Hey bear! I’m human! Get out of here and leave it! Hey!” 

At the sound of my voice, Sherlock immediately flinched and looked behind him. In one single second he lost his footing on the slope, and I watched, frozen in place, as he tumbled down the drainage, sliding down loose rock and getting whacked by the bushes. The bear heard him fall, and started to run towards the slope, peering over the edge to try and spot its new prey.

“Hey!” I screamed out even louder. My voice was wild - shrill and hoarse. “Hey leave it, bear!” I yelled. “Leave it! Get on, scram!”

I started walking slowly towards it as I continued waving my arms above my head. The bear looked at me, then looked back down the drainage to where Sherlock clung desperately at the edge of a ledge, about fifteen feet up from the ground and hanging on to the root of a thick branch.

“Leave it!” I screamed again. The bear rose up on its hind legs and looked at me across the valley. I desperately grabbed a huge branch by my feet and waved it in my arms, trying to make myself look as huge as possible. 

“Hey bear! Hey!”

The bear dropped back to all fours and looked at me for another moment, then he turned, sniffed once at the wolf, and started walking away from the steep ledge, half-running away back across the open tundra. I kept yelling and waving my arms until he was far out of sight. Even when I couldn’t see him, I waited another few minutes, desperately hoping I wouldn’t see him start to wander back.

When the horizon stayed clear, I dropped the branch in my hands and started to run. I was breathless. I barely even saw where I was sprinting as my feet carried me towards Sherlock, where he was still trying to pull himself back up over the ledge, legs and feet scrambling for purchase against the tumbling rock. 

“Sherlock, hold on,” I called out as I neared him. I climbed up around a smoother side of the slope, trying not to fall as I inched closer to where he was hanging. I could barely breathe. 

“Hang on, Sherlock, I’m here. I’m here.” I kept saying it, over and over, as if the power of my words alone would keep his hands gripped tightly around the branch. I realized in the back of my mind that my voice sounded much higher in my panic – uncontrolled and raspy as I called out to him again and again. A voice I hadn’t heard coming from my own mouth in nearly twenty years. 

I didn’t have time to care about the fact my voice was practically giving me away. I got myself good leverage above him on the slope, then I dug in my heels and reached down to grab for his hands. I gripped his wrists and pulled harder than I ever had in my life, grunting with the effort as I slowly pulled him back up. When his feet finally got a good hold on the rock, he heaved himself up and over then collapsed next to me on his chest. He was panting, and I could see that his hands and arms were shaking hard.

“Come on, gotta move,” I said, hefting him to his feet. “Can’t stay here if that bear comes back.”

I didn’t wait for his answer before pulling him along behind me by the wrist, not slowing down even when he stumbled on the uneven ground. I kept hold of his hand, yanking him and jogging away from the carcass as quickly as possible. I kept waiting for him to argue with me as we ran back towards camp – tell me that he needed to go back and study the site, or for me to leave him the hell alone, or for him to tell me that my actions were unnecessary in the extreme.

He didn’t say any of those things. He kept following behind me, panting for breath as I dragged him along the whole half-mile back to our tent. When we reached the open clearing of our campsite, I flung his wrist away from my hand. An explosion of panic and fury were flooding through my veins – that, and something that felt a lot like sheer, breathless terror. 

I turned to him where he stood with his hands on his knees and let loose. “What the fuck were you thinking?” I cried out. My voice echoed harshly across the valley. “Sneaking up on a bear with a carcass? A fucking grizzly bear that was about to feed? Are you insane?”

I couldn’t stop screaming. The words poured out of me as I paced in front of him, needing to stare at him to remember he was alive while also unable to look at him for even one second. He was watching me the way a young caribou would watch a wolf off in the distance, hunched over in his spine and with only a small cut on his cheek to show what just happened.

My lungs screamed. “You could have _died_ , Sherlock! What would you have done if I hadn’t woken up and noticed you were gone? What was your plan – did you even think at all or did you just see a fucking wolf and run towards it? In all my years as a Ranger I’ve never seen anyone do something so absolutely insane. What were you _thinking_?”

I was panting for breath. He stood there the whole time not saying a word back, hunching his shoulders while his eyes watched me pace back and forth. I wanted him to argue with me. Wanted him to yell back and push me away – to tell me that I shouldn’t have woken up with him in my arms, and that I was keeping him from his research, and that he never wanted to go hiking with me again. I wanted him to fight.

But he didn’t.

I stormed away from him, still hurling curses at him under my breath. I intended to walk away. To leave him behind me while I packed up the tent and forced us to leave. Instead I only took two steps away then pulled at my hair. 

“God, you’re a _fucking_ idiot,” I moaned out. Then I turned around, rushed back to him, took his face in my hands and kissed him.

His lips were so soft. 

It was all I could think about, all I could notice, as my lips smashed against his and our breaths mixed together. He tensed for a moment, holding his breath in his lungs, then he instantly went pliant under my hands, his spine melting towards me. It could have lasted three seconds, or it could have lasted three hours. His cheeks were cold under my hands, and his jaw strong and firm. His mouth tasted like sleep and coffee and mountain air. I moved my lips against his again, wanting to feel them warm and wet beneath my own, and a small sound escaped his throat, something like a sigh.

Then I realized what I was doing with a sickening jolt, one that slammed into my chest and nearly knocked me over.

I flinched away and ripped my hands back from his face, walking backwards so quickly I nearly tripped over my own feet. My mind was racing, and everything before me looked foggy and blurred. 

“God, I’m sorry,” I rushed out. I rubbed my hands over my mouth. “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to –”

He stood there blinking with his mouth half-open. His lips glistened from the wetness from my own mouth. Then he shook his head and took a step towards me, reaching out his hand. 

I stepped back again. “Please, I’m so sorry. I didn’t –”

“It’s alright,” he said. His voice was breathless like air.

I nearly laughed. “It’s _not_ alright,” I said. My voice sounded frantic. “It’s not – I didn’t mean to.” I tried to breathe and rubbed a hand over my eyes. “God, I shouldn’t have done that. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have –”

“I said it’s alright,” he said again. He reached out, and this time his hand landed on my arm. He gripped me softly. “It’s alright –”

“You don’t know,” I said, the words ripping from me before I could stop them. “You don’t understand. I can’t . . . It’s _not_ alright.” I was gasping for breath. I shut my eyes so I wouldn’t have to see his face. “I’m not . . . Sherlock, I’m not . . . I’m not really –”

“John,” I heard. His hands were on my shoulders. It was the first time he had ever said my real name, and the sound of it landed like water in the back of my throat. 

“I’m not –” I tried again, but he shook me gently with his hands.

“John,” he said again, and his voice was calm and gentle. I opened my eyes when he was silent, forcing myself to focus on his face. He was leaning down towards me, looking into my eyes. There was a sadness in them, one that clenched in my gut.

There was also hope.

He moved one hand to my jaw, gently resting over my beard. He took a slow breath. “John, I know,” he said softly.

Nothing made sense. I clenched my lips together and tried to stay standing. I shook my head against his palm. I tried again to speak, one last attempt to stop everything from falling apart. My voice was shaking. “But you don’t know. I’m not really a –”

“You are.” He held my face with both hands. “John, I know. I _know_.”

I wanted to believe him more than anything I’d ever felt in my whole entire life. More than I ever even wanted to get on that plane to New York. I wanted to believe that he knew, that he _knew_ , and that he was still holding my face in his hands.

I wanted . . .

“Please,” he said, interrupting my thoughts. His eyes were full and pleading. He licked his lips. “Please, John, kiss me again,” he said in a whisper.

I looked into his eyes for another long moment, trying to read everything in the clear, pale blue. His eyes looked familiar, the way Lugnut’s did that first time he ever squirmed in my arms. They looked like that first time I ever put the sock between my legs, and I zipped up my jeans, and held my hand there, and felt like it had been there all along. 

I wanted to ask him how he knew, and why he knew, and when. I wanted to ask if he understood what was hidden beneath my clothes, if he realized that nobody else had ever known, and if he wanted to see my bare skin. I wanted to ask him everything.

But more than any of those things, I looked at him, and I believed him.

“Sherlock,” I whispered. His name tasted like clean water flowing over my lips. He closed his eyes as I reached up shaking fingers to hold his jaw. He sighed, and I leaned forward, up on to my toes, and I kissed him again. 

That kiss was slow. I felt as each new part of my mouth touched his own, as my lips traced the lines of his, and as his breath fanned across my tongue. His hands were on my back, holding me close against him until I couldn’t feel any air at all between our bodies. 

I let the kiss take me.

It washed over my bones and made my muscles go loose. It settled in my chest pressed against his so I could feel his heartbeat along my own. It moved my hand to trace around the soft curve of his ear, stroking down his throat to feel his warm, fluttering pulse. He breathed deeply against me, and I opened my lips to taste him. It was the most intimate way I had ever touched another human being in my life. Over forty years, and I had never really tasted another man’s mouth so gently with my own. Had never really held him, or heard the flutter of his eyelashes, or felt the line of his jaw. I had never really _kissed_.

Not like that.

He pressed another soft kiss to the corner of my mouth, humming as his lips stroked gently across my beard. My lips were wet and cold in the air without the warmth of his mouth. He moved his hand around from the line of my spine to my chest, placing it right over where my heart was racing like mad.

We kept our foreheads together, sharing humid air as he spoke. “I really am an idiot,” he whispered.

I stroked along his jaw with both my thumbs and gave a breathless laugh. “Why is that?” I said back. My voice was unrecognizably low and calm.

He kissed my cheek again. “Two reasons. First, I didn’t follow the number one rule of ‘listen to the Ranger’.”

I laughed and stroked my nose along his, holding him close by the back of his neck as if I was afraid he would run away. 

“Second,” he went on. “I’ve spent the last nine weeks convincing myself that you were never, not in a thousand years, going to be interested in me,” he said.

Something fluttered in the back of my throat – a sudden rush of hot longing that I might have lived my whole life without knowing the feel of Sherlock Holmes’ lips against mine. I held him closer, pressing my cheek against his. I felt him swallow. 

“I think I wanted to kiss you from the first second you climbed up into my truck,” I said. The admission felt like clouds parting in the sky to reveal the sun. 

I pressed my lips to his jaw, dragging them slowly towards his ear. “Sherlock,” I whispered into his skin, simply because I _could_. He shivered beneath my hands and said, “fuck,” under his breath. The sound of it settled under my skin like smooth fire, licking up my spine and putting an ache between my legs. For the first time in a long time, I didn’t clench my thighs together to try to stop it. 

I still had a smile on my lips as I kissed him again, groaning a bit as he immediately opened his mouth to let in my tongue. It rushed through my body – the warmth of his breath, and the taste of his lips. The soft vibration as he moaned against my mouth and let me press inside of him. Let me run my fingers through his hair, and lick deeply into his mouth, and hold him by the hips so I could feel the curve of his bones beneath my palms.

He _let_ me. 

He let _me_.

After a long time, he finally pulled back to breathe. He was panting softly beneath my hands, and his lips were full and wet. I wanted to lick them. His eyes were closed, and I stroked his cheek with my thumb until they opened. They were bright and clear, utterly fixed on my face in the middle of Denali.

I didn’t know what to say. For a moment my mind raced trying to think of what I could possibly say to him - whether to thank him, or beg him to stay. To tell him that he was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen – that I would happily spend the rest of my summers watching him study tiny wolf paw prints in dried mud. To ask him if he realized he was the only human being alive who really knew. If he fully understood that I had expected to go through my entire life alone – to never again feel someone’s hands holding me when I came awake. If he knew what an impossible, unthinkable reality it was to have the taste of his lips still hovering on my tongue.

Then I realized, as I looked into his soft, calm face, that I didn’t have to say anything at all, not like that. I ran my hand through his curls and roughed them up a bit. “Got ten miles to hike today,” I said. “Should start now unless we want to be racing against the sun.”

He smiled and gently rolled his eyes. “Ever the Ranger,” he said. He took my hand and lifted it to his mouth, pressing his lips against my palm while he closed his eyes in a brief kiss. He held on to my hand even after letting it fall, and I knew there was one last thing I needed to say to him before we packed up the tent.

I gripped his fingers in mine. “Never, and I mean _never_ , go off on your own like that again,” I told him.

He nodded with serious eyes, rubbing his thumb along the back of my hand. “John,” he said quietly in the breeze, “I promise you.”

 

\--

 

Sherlock dropped to his knees and kissed the dirt when we arrived back at the Road nearly nine hours later. 

The whole hike back had been something like a dream, where I was floating across the tundra with him close by my side – where I could reach out and touch his hand, or feel his fingers run briefly through my hair.

Where I’d waited for him after crossing a flooded fork of the river and then pulled him into my arms, soaking wet and kissing him there on the shore just because I could. Where we hadn’t said anything important at all, and yet every time his hand touched mine had felt like a deep promise – a secret that I knew wouldn’t stay hidden out in the wilderness to wither and die.

I laughed at him as I plopped my pack down beside his along the Road, flinging myself down to rest against it as we waited for the next West-headed bus. I rubbed my hands over my tired face, scratching at my beard. I wanted a shower almost more than I wanted a nice, hot meal.

“You miss civilization that badly?” I asked him as he kicked off his hiking boots and loudly cracked his toes.

He pointed out at the Road. “You call this civilization?” he said. “Most people in London you plopped right here would think they’d landed on some godforsaken, desolate planet.”

I looked over at him, and suddenly my breath was taken away. I looked at his matted, sweaty curls, and the flush in his cheeks, the way he was moving his neck to crack it as he relaxed against his pack. I couldn’t stop the smile on my lips as I looked at him.

He glared back. “What?” he huffed. “You going to spend the next hour defending the wonders of your homeland to me?”

I grinned even wider and shook my head. “Just looking at you,” I said. I sat up to reach over and take his face into my hands – kiss him again to prove to ourselves that what had happened wasn’t being left behind out in the wilderness. But just then an East-bound bus came barreling around the corner. An idea flashed into my head – a desperate, sudden need. I raised my hand to flag it down, bending over to lift my pack.

Sherlock frowned, shielding his eyes with his hand as he studied the bus. “Don’t tell me you’re so head over heels for me that you’ve forgotten your East from West.”

I held out a hand to yank him to his feet. “No, you self-centered ass. I changed my mind. We’re gonna head East.”

When he didn’t move, I grabbed his arms and hauled him up to stand, shoving his pack into his arms before heading towards the waiting bus.

“Care to enlighten me anytime soon?” Sherlock asked from behind me. He was practically stomping his feet. I waited to answer until we were seated in the back of the bus, after I’d given a quick overview of our trip to the driver, guy named Gus, then settled our packs in the open space at the back.

I sat down by Sherlock where he was sitting with his arms crossed. He wouldn’t look at me as he pouted staring out the window, and that warm, breathless feeling once again fluttered behind my ribs. I briefly looked up to check that no one nearby was looking our way, then reached over to place my hand on his thigh.

“Got someone I want you to meet,” I said. 

Sherlock frowned. “I’ve met Molly.”

I shook my head. “It isn’t Molly.”

I thought of Lugnut lying down in his little hut in the shade, pining for his dinner and waiting to sniff me in the air.

I patted Sherlock’s leg again. “It’s a surprise,” I said. I smiled out the window as the tundra rushed past. I relaxed my neck against the seat. “But I think he’s really gonna like you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quick note about backcountry camping:  
> When camping in the backcountry, you need to utilize the triangle method of setting up camp. This means you have three separate locations, all about 100 feet from each other. One location is for your tent (ideally the most protected from the wind). The second location is for your bear can. You use this to lock inside all of your food and *anything* that has a scent from your packs (toiletries, chapstick, sunscreen, any bug sprays, etc.). The third location is your cook site, where you cook and eat your meals, brush your teeth, and use the bathroom. The triangle method means that any wildlife that comes sniffing around (particularly bears) will only find a bear can or an empty cook site, not you in your tent!
> 
> Also, I think this is obvious, but what Sherlock did was INCREDIBLY stupid. You should never get even within a few hundred yards of a wild grizzly bear. John's reaction is roughly your main option to scare it away - get close, but not too close, then alert the bear to your presence and try to make yourself look intimidating / human to scare it away. I am TERRIFIED of bears. My bear call out in Denali usually consisted of something along the lines of "holy shit get the fuck away from me holy shit." John is obviously a bit calmer under pressure.
> 
> Thank you SO DAMN MUCH for your love for this fic! Your love for Ranger John and Sherlock, your love for their love story, your love for their happiness, and your love for Denali. Sharing this story with you all really means a lot to me. And a huge thank you to all of you who trusted me through the hard angst last chapter! Your comments make Lugnut's tail go crazy and your kudos are like waking up to a fresh Denali sunrise.
> 
> Next time: we unfortunately head back to 1992 for another rough one (yep, *the* rough one), but it ends on a hopeful note of healing for our boys. <3 And if you're worried they aren't gonna have sex anytime soon, I'll give you a happy head's up that you're only one more chapter away :)


	9. July 1992

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bluegrass: Listen to Emmylou Harris sing "Your Long Journey" [HERE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dv1y4k5q_uo/).
> 
> Other perfect arrangements of this classic song:  
> Listen to Alison Krauss and Robert Plant [HERE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG_rArV84iY/).  
> Listen to the 'original' by Doc Watson and Rosa Lee [HERE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4k8DDcYXNVY/).  
> *Enjoy navigating through the mire of YouTube comments arguing whether Doc Watson originally sang "long journey" or "lone journey." 
> 
> Sarah Jarosz: Listen to "Little Song" [HERE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2R6uj52H58/).  
> And another Sarah rec for this chapter: Listen to "Lost Dog" [HERE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJd1yCMJbsE/).
> 
>  
> 
> ***Alright, y'all. It's that chapter. The one you knew was coming, and the one I've tried to give a clear and ample heads up for. I appreciate more than I can say that all of you are trusting me with this chapter - I know many of you have understandably reached out to say you would normally stay *far away* from a fic containing the death of a pet. I understand that with my whole heart and soul. However, I truly believe this chapter is not just pointless sadness. I hope you can trust me when I say I didn't put it in here just to rack up the angst.
> 
> I'll say three important things about this chapter (minor spoilers) if you need some more assurance:  
> 1\. The dog is *not* in pain.  
> 2\. John gets to be there with him.  
> 3\. If you can believe it, the chapter ends on the most hopeful note we've seen so far in 1992.
> 
> That being said, I know this will still be a difficult read. Hell, it was difficult for me to write. Please practice ample self care, and read in a time and place where you'll feel steady and safe. Like I said, there is a *hopeful* end to this chapter, and I promise that hope will continue, but it is a sad road to get there. I am SO grateful for your trust and encouragement, and I wish you happy and safe reading <3

July 1992

The nights grew dark and long.

They used to be my solace – for years I would look forward to my private little room while I was out on hard patrols, or spending days out in the backcountry, or running into Fairbanks those few times a year. I would daydream about the full silence that met me whenever I opened the front door. The way my socked feet would pad around the squeaky spots on the wood floor, and the way the smell of my coffee filled the whole cabin, and the way that my bed caressed every part of my body in the darkness, stripping away everything until it was just my skin against the sheets, and every breath in the air was one I’d taken with my own lungs.

It was all the same reasons I loved my cabin back in Talkeetna. Why I went back to it winter after punishing winter, even though Molly and the other Rangers all practically begged me to take on a winter job. In those deepest parts of winter, tucked away in my little corner of the woods, the nights would last sometimes twenty hours long. The darkness would surround me, filling every corner until my eyes only saw in black and grey. It would drape over my fingers and cling to my body like heavy fog – turn my skin pale and my hair too long. It would hover just outside the reach of my old gas lamp, which I’d keep turned low enough just to cast a spot of light on the book in my hands.

I would chop wood in the dark, haul my water and prepare my food in the dark. I built half that cabin in the dark, caressing every piece of rough wood with my bare hands before hammering it into place, closing off my own haven from the rest of the world.

Even when I was little, I loved the dark. I’d wait until my sister and parents were asleep in our little trailer, then tiptoe out the front door slow enough that it wouldn’t make a sound. I’d spend those summer nights sitting out in the dirt yard on a sawed-off log, blinking in the darkness even though I couldn’t see a thing and then staring up for hours at the wide black sky. 

When I was older, and we moved to the crooked, sagging house two miles outside town, my parents told my sister and I to fight it out over whether to share the bedroom or not – and whoever didn’t get it would have to make do up in the attic. And I surprised them all by immediately sprinting with my duffel bag up to the attic before my sister could even start to bully me into taking it. My dad built me a bed up there, hauling up the wood with me and showing me how to fit it all together. I’d sat there watching his huge, rough hands against the wood for hours, and he told me all about the screws and wrenches and nails he was using to build it. 

When the bed was done, and I’d thrown my thin mattress on top, he’d sat with me by my side for a long time on that bed.

“ _You know, Ranger,_ ” he’d said, the nickname he always called me after I’d found my sister’s lost cat one summer in the woods, “ _One day you’re gonna make a man mighty glad to have you around. Getting awful good at helping me out around the house with your tools._ ”

I’d burned with pride and prickled under my arms. I hunched my spine back so my big t-shirt hung loose over my chest, making it so my growing nipples didn’t poke out anymore beneath the fabric. And he’d reached out to ruffle my hair, rough and so it stuck up in all directions, not softly like he always stroked through my sister’s.

“ _Yup_ ,” he’d said. “ _Gonna make a man mighty lucky to have ya around._ ”

Just over six years later, after he chased me down the driveway with his shotgun while my mom screamed and cried that I’d ruined them all while collapsing onto the front porch, for some reason that bed had stuck in my mind my whole sprint into town. I’d wondered if they would keep it – whether my dad would ignore it for decades and let it rot up in the attic, or whether he’d storm up and break it all apart with his bare hands. 

And as I’d run, and the strip of cotton around my chest had eventually come loose and fallen off, I’d wondered if I would ever have a place like that attic on earth again – where the darkness had welcomed me each night with open arms, and where the darkness hadn’t seen my long hair or my delicate face. Where I’d first whispered the name John between the thin sheets, and first placed the sock down into my jeans. Where no one else on earth had ever breathed the same air, aside from that one day when my dad had built my brand new bed with his own hands.

The Denali nights had never felt as suffocating as they did that summer. The darkness only fully settled over the park for a few hours, but when it did, I’d find myself lying awake and staring at the ceiling, sometimes still fully dressed from the day before. 

I couldn’t feel the sheets against my skin. If I did, they’d remind me of how it felt to be pressed between them and his warm body. How they would rasp against my back when he kissed down my stomach, when he looked up at me with heavy eyes as he took the cock he’d given me into his mouth, humming around it and groaning as if the plastic actually had a taste, gripping my hips and sucking me until I could almost feel the press of his lips against my real skin, until I would grab his hair and pant for breath and finally come, rubbing against the bottom of the cock pumping into his mouth. My _own_ cock disappearing into his full, wet lips. And the sheets would pool with damp sweat at the low of my back as I rolled my hips towards him. As I made him take me, deeper, and deeper, and more, and he’d pull off panting with his lips glistening wet and moan, “ _Fuck me, John. Come inside me. Come on._ ”

And the darkness reminded me how he sought out the secret places on my body. How he’d reach for me in the middle of the night and place his hand over my chest in the darkness, stroking his thumb along my scars as if they were the most fascinating things on the whole entire earth – as if he couldn’t possibly stand to let the knowledge of them disappear into the dark. The darkness remembered how he’d beg me to drag my beard across his skin. The sheets remembered the feel of his hands clutching them tight as I draped myself on top of him and gripped handfuls of his hair.

While I lay there in my bed staring up at the ceiling, waiting and praying for that first hint of sunlight to finally appear, I’d remember, in those final minutes, the way he would fall asleep on my chest. How he would wrap himself around me as if he’d never let me go. How I’d press a kiss into his curls and hold him close across his warm back. How he would trail his fingertips through the pathetically small hairs on my chest as if they were something he actually wanted to feel, and he’d smirk at me and say, “ _My Ranger, oh, my brave, strong Ranger,_ ” until I finally cracked a smile and laughed. 

And on those nights, staring up at the ceiling with half my bed empty, I wondered if he was also waiting for the first hint of the sun. If he was eating enough, and if he was making himself his own coffee or tea. I wondered if he was warm enough against the thick, dark cold.

I knew he wasn’t using anymore, not since that one night just over three weeks ago when he’d knocked softly at my door. I’d seen him a handful of times since then, always randomly around Toklat or even passing by each other on long stretches of the Road. It was the most I’d accidentally run into him around the park before, even more than that last summer where I had searched for him around every corner when he wasn’t sitting beside me in my truck or waking up in my own bed.

We’d nod when we saw each other. Nod and keep quickly walking away. Even through the dark circles under his eyes and his thinning wrists, I could tell, deep in my core, that the crook of his arm didn’t have any new marks. It was as if an odd understanding had settled over us since that night – one that said we were both broken, and unhappy, and fucked, but also one that said we were both going to keep nodding and walking away, as if the nodding and the walking were as fixed in place in the universe as the base of Denali itself. And there wasn’t any anger, or fear, or sadness, there was just. . . nothing, just walking away, and every night when I stared at the ceiling I couldn’t decide which would be worse. 

Sherlock stuck around Greg a lot during those weeks. I’d see them from afar bending over their maps in one of the offices, or hiking out to the Road to catch a bus, or standing in front of their team’s cabin arguing over whether Sherlock had really needed to tell Babs that her boyfriend back in London was undoubtedly cheating on her with the neighbor. 

I saw them on the East side one day when I’d taken my morning off to go visit Lug. I’d tried to see him much more often since Sherlock Holmes nearly sprinted out my cabin door – as if the reminder of what I used to do at night in my cabin – cook Sherlock dinner, lounge on the couch with his feet in my lap, fall asleep by his side – suddenly made it unbearable to spend any of my days off in that same space. 

I was walking away from the kennels after sitting with old Lug for a few hours, trailing my fingers through his fur and telling him about the moose fight I’d seen the day before from my truck with the window rolled down. I scratched at my face and smelled Lugnut’s fur on my fingers – I was letting my beard grow back in, and my hands were constantly picking at it on my cheeks and jaw, as if they couldn’t decide whether growing it back out to look more like myself outweighed the fact that he used to love to kiss through the hair.

Then I saw him. Actually, Greg saw me. They were standing together near C-Camp on the other side of the Road, looking like they were waiting for a ride back out West. I could see the moment of indecision on Greg’s face as he looked me up and down, then he took a step forward and held up his hand to wave me over. Dread settled in my chest. I quickly glanced at Sherlock standing to Greg’s side, expecting him to scowl at him, or scowl at me, or just walk away. Instead he was standing with his arms gently crossed over his chest, slightly turning away and staring at his feet on the ground. 

The wrongness of him standing that way pulled at my limbs. I wanted to storm over there and grab him by the shoulders and shake him until he straightened out his spine. Tell him that he needed to get his ass back on a plane to London so he could start living his real life – that he could do a million times better than me, that he needed to go find someone he didn’t have to fix. Someone who was normal, and who could live with him in the city, and who could fuck him with his own real body.

I also wanted to tell him that I could do a million times better than him – that in the deepest, darkest parts of me that still replayed scenes from last summer over and over, I wondered why I was ever stupid enough to let my guard down. Why I held him in my arms and kissed him that first backcountry trip. Why I ever invited him into my room, into the darkness, and stripped off my clothes. Why I thought any of that was real, and not just a way to keep a genius from getting bored. Why I sometimes kept the lights on.

I started walking towards them. I shoved my hands in my pockets so I wouldn’t impulsively cover my mouth or scratch at my face. I didn’t want to look nervous at something so simple as saying hello to two researchers across the Road. Well, a researcher who asked me to throw away his drugs for him three weeks ago, and a good friend.

Greg kept talking to Sherlock as I walked closer. I watched him reach his hand out to gently hold Sherlock by the arm – something I noticed Greg often did with him and that used to make my chest feel warm, a small flutter of relief that Sherlock had had Greg beside him for all those years, and that they’d found each other long before Sherlock ever stepped inside my truck. Even if they both claimed they’d only ever spoken to each other about wolves.

I only took a few steps towards them when a familiar white van pulled up in the Road and blocked my way. I saw Molly lean across the passenger seat towards Greg and Sherlock to talk to them, motioning for them to get inside so she could give them a ride. She hadn’t seen me. I stopped dead in my tracks on the other side of the Road, desperately wanting to say hello to Molly but also dreading walking over. I waited for another minute, awkwardly sticking my hands in my pockets so I wouldn’t keep fiddling with the patches on my uniform shirt – a habit Molly had been making fun of me for doing for years. 

“ _God, John, you’re like a Girl Scout playing with her brand new Brownie patches,_ ” she’d said once, laughing and slapping my hands away from where they’d been picking at the Ranger patch on my uniform. We’d been caught in a seemingly endless conversation with some visitors by the kennels, and thankfully Molly had taken over and handled most of the conversation. 

Her words had made a cold sweat instantly break out over my skin. I’d tried to smile and wiped my sweating palms off on my pants. 

“ _You alright, there_?” she’d asked, frowning at me. She’d reached out to take my hand. “ _Aw, you know I was just joking,_ ” she’d said. “ _Didn’t mean to hurt your feelings_.”

And I’d looked at her and tried to make my face look normal. I’d wrapped my arm around her shoulders and ruffled her hair, same as always. “ _’Course you were joking, kid,_ ” I’d said, even though my heart was racing in my chest. And we’d gone on with the day – hadn’t ever brought it up again. And the worst part of it all was that I knew she _had_ been just joking, and even that couldn’t stop the panic from flooding through my veins when she laughed and called me “ _her_.”

I stood there with my hands in my pockets watching the side of the van. I could hear the muffled tones of Molly and Greg’s voices, and only once heard Sherlock say something that was just one syllable. Just when I figured Greg would inevitably let Molly know I was there – when I thought they would all turn towards me, and Molly would hold her hands out for a hug through the window, and I could give them all a quick wave, I watched Greg and Sherlock climb up into the van. Without a glance towards me, the van sped away, Molly laughing at something Greg was saying in the passenger seat and the back windows tinted too much for me to see if Sherlock even noticed I was still there.

I watched the van drive away until it disappeared in a small cloud of dust around the next bend. The breeze blew against me, blowing some of the dust into my face and nearly knocking off my hat. I knew I looked ridiculous – Ranger by himself just standing half in the Road with his hands in his pockets, staring at the place where a van had driven away more than a full minute ago. And yet, I couldn’t move. 

Somehow, out of nowhere, I felt that every connection I’d ever had with another human being was in that van – that everyone who truly knew me, who’d heard me say real words as John and not Ranger Watson, had just driven away without taking me with them, even though I’d been dreading walking over to say hello in the first place.

Suddenly I desperately needed to go back and see Lugnut one more time. My hands twitched to hold him, and I needed to feel his nose against my neck. I turned on my heels and started darting off back into the trees, but I’d only taken two steps when I heard someone calling out behind me.

“Hello! Do you work here?”

I shut my eyes and took a second to school my face so I wouldn’t look annoyed. I turned and put on a smile, reaching up to push the brim of my hat higher up on my head. “Sure thing. Can I help you?”

It took me almost half an hour to help the family that had flagged me down figure out how to navigate the park busses before answering questions about bears to the two small kids, answering the traditional question of “what made you want to become a Ranger?” with the story of my Canyonlands hike, and then physically walking them to the nearest bus stop by the kennels, which then added on another ten minutes of pointing out each dog’s name from far away.

I looked down at my watch after they’d finally thanked me for the final time and boarded the bus. The time I had been planning to spend with Lugnut before my later shift was totally gone, and I knew I’d just barely make it back to Toklat if I hopped in my truck right then. 

And in that moment, I felt lonelier than I had in the last twenty years combined. Standing alone by the empty bus stop with my closest friend in the world driving a van away from me down the Road, and my dog waiting for me to come pet him even though I didn’t have the time.

I swallowed hard over my unexpectedly wet throat and walked towards my truck, hopping in quickly and revving the engine too hard as I pulled onto the Road. For a whole hour back I thought of nothing at all – just the curves of the Road that I could follow in my sleep, and the feeling of the sun-warmed steering wheel under my hands.

And then, for the next hour, I thought of that morning when Sherlock had dragged us both out of bed before the sun. I’d stood in just my boxers in my kitchen rubbing my eyes to wake up, asking him why the hell he’d dragged me out of bed when he knew I had a full day of patrols later on. And he’d looked at me and said, “You don’t have any patrols later. I’ve got you the day off.” And he hadn’t explained to me what the hell we were doing as he forced me to dress and lead me down to the truck. He hadn’t said a word as he hopped in the driver’s seat before I could, then started driving us East with my favorite tape already in the player.

And I thought, as I drove back West without Sherlock by my side, of how Sherlock had smiled at me when he pulled us into the lot by the kennels. How he’d pulled a leash out from his pocket as we walked towards Lugnut, who was leaping up into the air and barking when he saw us both coming his way. Sherlock had secured the leash while Lugnut licked his face and handed it to me, saying, “We’re going on a bit of a field trip, Ranger.” And as I told him that he was technically stealing government property by putting Lugnut in my truck, Sherlock hadn’t listened to a word I’d said, and instead he’d driven us away and out of the park, speeding down Highway 3 until a turn off a half-hour later, and all the while Lugnut had lounged in my lap with his head hanging out the window in the wind, tongue flapping out.

We’d split a bag of jerky Sherlock had snuck into the truck and thrown a stick for Lugnut to chase after in the open meadow nearby. And when Lugnut had gotten tired, he’d plopped down to nap in the shade, and Sherlock had laid me down on top of the Pendleton blanket on the grass, and he’d kissed me under the open sky until my body was hot and shaking.

And I thought of how that had been the day when I’d put my whole idea together. Lying there in the grass with Sherlock on my chest and Lugnut curled up by our feet in the bright sun. I’d thought that maybe I could have all of that – really have it. That I could ask Sherlock to stay with me, share my cabin for the winter, and I could finally adopt Lugnut from the kennels the way I’d been meaning to do for years, and we could eat jerky and play fetch for a hundred days a year instead of just one.

As I pulled into Toklat and gave a wave to a bus of visitors, the last thing I thought of was the key in my bedside drawer – the one that sat next to the rolled up sock every night. The extra key to my cabin in Talkeetna that I’d had made, but never given. 

I did my afternoon and evening patrols that day without a problem, not even getting a radio call as I sped up and down the Road and scanned the distance. When I made it back to Toklat I felt exhaustion in my bones, even though I’d barely even walked at all that day. I trudged away from the truck after I’d cleaned it for the night, holding the back of my neck as I made my way towards my cabin. For the second time that day, someone called out frantically behind me.

“John!”

I turned to see Greg jogging my way from one of the offices. A pulse of longing flashed through me when I wondered if Sherlock was in there too. My body ached for my cabin – for the darkness and the quiet and the single chair at the kitchen table, where I could strip off my dirty clothes from my tired limbs and sit with the lights off and breathe.

I nodded at him and ran a hand through my hair which was lying flat from my hat. “Greg,” I said back.

He looked nervous. He slowed to a walk as he reached me and rubbed the back of his neck with his hand. Before I could ask him how he was, he looked right into my eyes and started speaking.

“Look, mate, I just gotta come right out and say it.”

I tensed, flinching a bit in fear at what he was about to say. He sighed deeply and shook his head. “I feel like a right bastard for leaving you behind earlier back East,” he said. “The second I let Molly drive away – you know she didn’t see you there – God, I felt like the world’s biggest arsehole.”

I hummed and gave him a small smile, sticking my hands back in my pockets. “Aw, Greg, no worries about that,” I said. “I knew you were just waiting for a ride.”

He didn’t smile back. “But I know you would have wanted to see Molly. To say hello.”

I shrugged, blushing without really knowing why. “Can see her anytime,” I said. “I didn’t think anything of it, really. You’re fine.”

I hoped he didn’t know how long I’d stood there watching the van drive away down the Road. That he hadn’t looked in the rearview mirror, or that Sherlock hadn’t deduced it and blurted it out.

He gave me a sad grin and exhaled a long breath through his nose. “Look, John,” he said. He shrugged his shoulders once. “I really miss you this summer. Not seeing you around the cabin or out East with Molly – I’ve been figuring out for weeks how to tell you that without sounding a bit pathetic.”

A dull ache landed in my chest. I felt the sudden need to pull him into a hug. Instead I hugged my arms around myself against the evening chill. “Not pathetic at all,” I said. “I’ve been thinking of you guys, too.”

He had that look in his eyes which I’d seen him get before – where he was fighting with himself to get up the courage to say something he knew I’d flinch away from. Before I could start talking about anything else to stop him, he went on. “To be honest, I’ll tell you things have been pretty good between me and Sherlock lately,” He huffed out a laugh. “Actually, better than in the whole fifteen years I’ve known him.”

I forced myself to nod. “Yeah, that’s good –”

“But it isn’t good,” he said. He shuffled his feet in the gravel and spoke out to the dry river bed. “For me and Sherlock Holmes to go three weeks without getting in a single argument – without him calling me an idiot or me calling him an utter twat – it’s just, I mean that’s what we do. It’s how we’ve always worked. And I . . . well, I’ve told you before, I trust him with my life. Think more highly of the bastard than almost anyone else on the planet.” He rubbed his hand over his mouth, still looking out at the mountains instead of at me. “But . . . this person who he is now – who just goes along with whatever I say and shows up for every meeting – I mean, sure it’s nice as a little break, and Max and Babs aren’t in tears every other night, but it isn’t Sherlock Holmes.”

I thought of Sherlock’s fingers shaking as he’d pushed the drugs towards me across the table. I couldn’t tell where Greg was heading with it all – whether he understood how much his words twisted like a knife in my chest, or whether he was going to demand an explanation, or whether he was going to blame me for turning Sherlock Holmes into a man who always just agreed.

I just nodded down at my feet. Greg put his hand on my shoulder. “Christ, I’m sorry, now I’ve just gone and made you think I’m about to blame you for it all.”

A surprised laugh burst out of me. “Just a bit,” I said.

His eyes looked sad. They made me want to turn and sprint away back to my cabin, grab my things and run to go take a shower in the dark, just the way I used to back when everything made sense. He cleared his throat and motioned with his head to walk up towards the cabins. Our feet crunched through the gravel so loudly it felt like the entire park could hear it.

“What I’m trying to say is,” he finally said. “He’d been having a good day, today. Little more like his usual self. He even said I was the least qualified researcher he’d ever met in his life – that a pile of wolf scat would be more knowledgeable about its own chemical makeup than I was.” We both chuckled before Greg took a deep breath and went on. “Earlier today . . . I just didn’t know what would make it worse. Having you come over, or just . . . taking up Molly’s offer when it came. I used to be able to read Sherlock like a book, but now I can’t.”

I kept my head down at my feet as we walked. It was silent for a long time as I tried to think of what to say. Finally, I looked up at him as we reached the path where we would part ways. “Like I said, I didn’t think anything of it,” I said. “No big deal.” I took a step away towards my cabin and held up a hand. “I’m glad he’s doing better,” I said as I walked away. Greg gave me an odd look, as if he was about to step forward and keep talking. 

“I’ll try and see you around more,” I said over my shoulder. He let me go.

That night I sat at my kitchen table for a long time, long after the rest of Toklat had drifted off to sleep. I looked down at my folded hands on the table, tracing the lines of decades’ worth of callouses and scars. He had once catalogued every one of them in a notebook, drawing exact sketches as if he was a botanist studying his samples. He’d asked me for the story behind each one, and for the ones I couldn’t remember, he’d gone ahead and figured out where it was from.

He’d asked me about the little round burn mark in the middle of my palm. His fingers had cradled my hand in the candlelight across my kitchen table. I’d looked down at his smooth hand holding my own rough skin and said, “My mom smoked.” I hadn’t needed to say anything more.

Now I looked at the burn mark in the heavy darkness, barely catching sight of it on my skin in the moonlight through the curtains. My conversation with Greg sat oddly in my gut, churning until I couldn’t remember what he’d actually said, and what I’d imagined.

I thought of Sherlock pacing my kitchen and holding his curls. “ _Why do we have to move on?_ ”

Suddenly an idea burned brightly in my chest. I wanted to walk over to his cabin and bang hard on his door. Tell him that I was sorry, that I knew now that he couldn’t have meant those words he said up on that mountain the way they came out – that he couldn’t have pressed his lips to the cigarette burn on my palm and then just a few weeks later told me I was only his way of not being bored.

Tell him that I was just as stupid as he always said every other human being was. 

The uselessness of it all choked me. Before I could second guess myself, I shoved my chair back from the table, grabbing my jacket and uselessly running fingers through my hair. I needed to see him. To pull him out of his daze and straight into my arms. Tell him I would forgive him even if he shot me in my own chest if only he understood how much I needed him. That I wasn’t really John Watson to anyone on the entire planet but him.

That I was too alone, and that I didn’t need to be.

I flung open my cabin door and started to walk towards his, frantically running through everything I could possibly say in my mind as I walked. I was just about halfway there when, through the moonlight, I saw his cabin door burst open. Sherlock leaped out into the darkness with Greg hot on his heels. 

“We have roughly thirty minutes to get there before that nearby grizzly gets to it first,” Sherlock was calling as they ran. He was smiling, his eyes wild, as they sprinted down towards the trucks. I watched Sherlock toss the keys effortlessly to Greg before they hopped in one of the government vans and sped off into the night. They hadn’t seen me.

For the second time that day, I stood there frozen watching taillights disappear into the distance.

I kicked a nearby rock as hard as I could and cursed. It had been ridiculous. I didn’t even know what I’d been thinking in the first place – that after a whole year of hiding from him, of telling him “not now” and “not anymore,” that I could somehow walk into his cabin and expect him to welcome me back with open arms.

I blinked hard at the sudden water in my eyes and walked back towards my cabin.

“You alright John?” 

The soft voice startled me to my right. I peered through the darkness to see Hannah coming out of the bathroom, holding her toiletries bag with a worried expression on her face.

I clenched my hands and tried to smile. “What? Yeah, just. . stumbled for a second.”

She took two steps closer. I could barely make out her face in the light of the stars. “Haven’t seen you in a while. Was wondering how you were.”

I tried to think of the last time I had actually spoken to Hannah – something beyond the countless small waves she sent me around camp. “Ah, good. Yeah, I’m good.” I added just a second too late, “And you?”

She smiled warmly. “Oh, I’m great.” She looked around at the dark mountain slopes. “God, it’s just gorgeous here, isn’t it? Like a movie.”

I crossed my arms over my chest and chuckled. “Feels a bit like a movie sometimes, yeah.”

She leaned towards me, peering through the darkness at my face. “Oh, you’re growing your beard back!” she said. 

I impulsively reached up to scratch at my cheek. “Yeah. . . Molly’s clean-shaven idea just wasn’t working for me,” I said. “Made it so all the bears finally realized I was human.”

Hannah chuckled. I could smell her fruity body wash still clinging to her warm skin. I couldn’t remember when she had moved so close to me, and she was tall enough that I had to tilt my eyes up to meet her gaze.

“It looks nice on you,” she said in a low, smooth voice. “I like it.” I noticed her hand moving, reaching up towards my face.

I understood what was happening all in one moment. I hastily stepped back, hands automatically shaking. “Thank you,” I said too casually. “So do the bears, from what I hear.”

She took another step towards me and tucked her hair behind her ear. “John –”

I put up my hand. “Hannah, look. . .” I tried to think of what to say.

Her eyes looked so sad, wilting like flower petals caught under too heavy rain. Her mouth twitched in a forced smile. “I think you’re really great,” she said.

There was a soft moan building at the back of my throat. I rubbed my neck. “Hannah,” I said again. “Look, I . . . it means a lot. It does. But, we don’t really know each other at all.”

“I want to get to know you,” she said quickly. Her face was glowing and young. “I’d like that, and maybe –”

“Hannah. . .”

She clutched her bundle of dirty clothes to her chest. “Is it because I’m too young?” she asked. 

The vastness of everything she was missing almost made me want to laugh. I wanted, more than anything, to just crawl into my bed. To sleep off the utter shit of a day I’d just had and wake up with a clear mind.

Wake up in a pair of warm, strong arms around my waist.

“I _am_ probably twice your age,” I said. “And I’m the most prickly son of a bitch in the whole entire park.” I could see her sagging as she knew what I was about to say. I swallowed hard. “You should . . . we can get to know each other a bit, sure, but you should find –”

“No, it’s alright,” she said quickly. She nodded once then looked straight down at her feet as she started walking away. “I’m so sorry,” she said again as she walked past. “I . . . I had it wrong. I’m sorry.”

I watched her speed walk back to her cabin a few down from mine without saying anything back. The sheer impossibility of the situation settled over me like a strong gust of wind. My limbs ached. Standing there in the dark under the stars outside my cabin, the reality that I’d fucked up every single interaction of the day made my throat feel hot and tight. I wanted to run over to her and somehow console her – tell her that she shouldn’t feel bad at all, because she’d never in a million years win by hitting on a man in his forties who was gay. On a man like me.

I heard noises coming from her cabin – the muffled sound of her bunkmate coming out to the kitchen to see what had happened. I heard voices, saw a light flicker on, and the shadows of two people coming together through the curtains. And then I heard the unmistakable sound of a stifled, wretched sob.

I couldn’t take it. I ran back into my cabin and shut the door behind me, making my way through in the blinding dark until I was seated on my bed, still fully dressed in my clothes and shoes. I sat there for a long time holding my face in my hands. I seriously considered getting in my truck to go and see Lugnut – so I could hold him and tell him all the ways I was apparently making everyone I knew feel uncomfortable and sad. So I could feel him lick my face and nuzzle his nose against my neck.

But I had work in the morning – an early patrol. I’d never make it back in time for my shift if I drove East. By the time I fell asleep that night, still in my clothes, the sun was already rising, and my alarm blared to wake me up after less than two hours.

 

\--

 

I got the call exactly one week later.

I’d just come back from a grueling and long shift – one that made my eyes burn and my tired muscles ache. I’d spent half the day going up and down the Alpine Hike to deal with some stray wildlife that had gotten too close to the visitors, and by the time I’d finished cleaning off the truck my body felt like it was screaming at the joints.

Just as I was about to head up to my cabin, I looked over my shoulder and caught sight of one of the best sunsets in weeks. The clear, open sky was streaked with thick washes of purple and gold, pouring down the mountain slopes and brushing the tops of the trees. The entire valley was suspended in warm, golden water, fluttering gently in the haze from the heavy sun. I turned around and walked out to the dry river bed alongside the camp, breathing in the scent of the slowly settling earth and enjoying the soft press of the breeze on my neck. Everything was silent, and everything was still.

I don’t know how long I stood there with my eyes half-closed when I heard a voice behind me.

“Watson!” Nick called out. I looked back over my shoulder to see him standing with one foot out of one of the small offices. “Watson!” he yelled again, waving me towards him. I took one last good look at the sunset over Denali’s peak before slowly heading towards the offices with my hands in my pockets. I was waiting for Nick to tell me about some scheduling issue or another – that or a training that I might have to cover if someone else was sick.

But the moment I saw his face more clearly I realized it wasn’t going to be about schedules or training at all. He waited until I was within normal speaking distance before gesturing back into the office.

“Phone for you,” he said in a flat voice. Panic startled to prickle under my arms and down my sides. I forced myself to walk at a normal speed towards the phone, picking it up slowly so my hand would be steady.

“Yeah?” I said into the receiver.

“John,” said Molly’s voice.

All at once, I knew.

The air rushed from my lungs, and I leaned forward to rest my weight on my hand against the desk. “How long?” I whispered.

Her voice was clear and calm. “You should leave now,” she said. “You’ll make it, but you should leave now.”

I slammed down the receiver without giving her back an answer and rushed past Nick, who was standing awkwardly in the door. I couldn’t even hear the sound of the gravel crunching under my feet. My legs were stiff and numb, like I was running through thick mud.

“Don’t worry about getting back here,” Nick called behind me. “We’ll cover you tomorrow!”

I ignored him. I couldn’t bare to think through the implications of what he’d just said. I threw myself in the truck and started the engine, trying to breathe to keep my hands steady enough to get the truck into gear.

Then my passenger door flung open. 

I cursed as I jumped and looked over to my right. Sherlock Holmes was effortlessly leaping up into the seat, dressed in his uniform pants and a too-big sweater with his dressing gown haphazardly thrown over his frame.

I blinked hard to convince myself that he was real. “What are you –”

“I’m going with you,” he said. He looked at me quickly before staring straight ahead. It was the first time I’d heard his voice so clearly since he said, “ _I never should have come here,_ ” as he sprinted out my cabin door.

I surprised myself when I heard my mouth say, “Fine,” before peeling out of the parking lot and onto the darkening Road.

We didn’t speak again that whole drive. I didn’t allow myself to think. I knew if I started thinking about Lugnut wondering where I was that I wouldn’t be able to safely navigate the sharp twists of the Road. I wanted to think I was irritated at having Sherlock invite himself along – that I would rather be alone, or that he was making me uncomfortable, or making everything worse. That I was too vulnerable right then to have someone else witnessing the shake in my hands. 

But instead I was only aware that I was achingly glad that my passenger seat wasn’t empty - an unexpected flame of sharp relief that kept the tips of my fingers from growing numb. His own fingers tapped an odd rhythm onto his thigh while we drove, and even though he never once looked my way for the three hours, I knew that he was watching my face in the reflection of his window.

My spine felt frozen in place by the time I finally pulled into the lot next to the kennels. I shut off the engine and held the keys in my hands, and then, in a great rush, everything hit me. 

I couldn’t move. 

I wanted to scream up to the sky for everything to just pause, for things to rewind by five years, or even five hours. For me to have more time, and more time, and more. I sat in the seat in the gathering dark and stared blankly at the wheel. I didn’t want to get out of that truck and see what was happening with my own two eyes. I didn’t want to see the look on Molly’s face. I didn’t want to move.

After a few seconds I heard Sherlock shift beside me. He reached over to gently take the keys from my hands, careful so our fingers didn’t touch in the process.

“Let’s go, John,” he said in a very soft voice.

That snapped me out of it. I looked over at him, suddenly desperate to prove to myself that he’d really just sat by my side for three hours along the Road. He looked right back, waiting patiently for me to move. We stared at each other, and he only blinked once.

The words rushed out of my mouth in a whisper before I could stop them. “Stay with me,” I said.

He nodded with solemn eyes. “Of course.”

Molly was standing outside the main kennel office waving me her way. I was grateful when she didn’t even bat an eye that Sherlock was walking right behind me. She silently stepped aside so I could come into the room. The office was small and filled mostly with feeding supplies.

When I hesitated, Molly said, “to the left,” and nodded into the other room. For one brief moment I felt Sherlock’s hand on the low of my back, then I stepped through the doorway into the quiet, dark warmth.

Three of the other kennel Rangers and the head vet were all inside, crowded around a huge, soft dog bed on the floor. They looked up when I walked in, and the other Rangers immediately got to their feet and started to leave. They didn’t look at me as they walked by me. Didn’t try to reach out or say empty words.

Lugnut sniffed me in the air. I saw his little nose twitch before he tried to lift up his head. Immediately when he saw me his tail began to wag, thumping into the bed where he was sprawled out on his side.

I rushed to him and dropped to my knees before holding his face in my hands. “You waited for me, old man,” I said. His tail wagged even harder. He was whimpering under his breath, and he couldn’t lift up his head or his legs. I glanced up at the vet who knew my question before I even asked.

“He’s not in pain,” she said. “We gave him some medication when Molly called you, so he’d feel alright.”

I knew that Molly and Sherlock were still standing in the doorway. The vet got to her feet and moved to the other side of the room, too.

I pretended none of them were there, and I lay down on the hard wooden floor beside Lugnut’s body. He nuzzled towards me as much as he could, and I held him closer with my hands. I could feel every thin bone of his ribs beneath my palm. His lungs were heaving.

I pressed my cheek to his snout and whispered softly so only he could hear. “This bed’s a lot nicer than that old pile of straw out in our hut, huh?” I said. I kissed the top of his nose. “They’re really spoiling you today. Giving you the nice bed, letting you be inside where it’s warm.”

He grunted in agreement, and his tongue weakly reached out to lick my face. “Did they give you extra dinner today, old boy? Sneak you some treats?” I breathed in the scent of his fur and tried to keep my voice steady. Somehow I knew that if I lost control that it would hurt him – that he needed me to be the normal, calm John so he wasn’t scared. 

Everything else fell away. I lay with him on the floor for well over an hour. Eventually I heard people shuffling out of the room, but when I looked back over my shoulder, Sherlock was still there. He was sitting on the floor in the corner with his head back against the wall. His eyes were closed, but I knew he knew exactly where I was. And I knew that the simple fact of him being in the room was the only thing keeping the hot lump out of my throat.

Lugnut eventually relaxed as I held him in my arms. I massaged his ears the way that always made him groan, and softly rubbed his side, and kissed the top of his nose. His pale blue eyes opened every once in a while to look into my face, and when he did, I would talk to him, tell him about anything and nothing at all. 

I told him, in the softest whisper, about the bed I built with my dad. The reason why I showered in the dark for two years back at Canyonlands, and the first time I ever saw a grizzly with my own eyes. I told him about falling off my horse in the Grand Canyon, and how I’d lost all my water, and I told him how over the last ten years, after all of my kennel visits, I never washed my hands so I could keep smelling a bit of his fur.

And I knew that Sherlock could hear every word coming out of my mouth, and that he was watching me lie on the hard floor like a child. And I didn’t care.

Lugnut started to twitch more in my arms, and the sounds in his throat became louder. He kept trying to sit up, struggling against the weight of his own body, and when his legs failed him, I held his face in my hands. “Can’t do that just yet, old Lug,” I told him. I swallowed hard. “Soon you’ll feel alright, everything will be better. But for now you gotta lay here with me, just for a bit.”

I heard Molly’s footsteps behind me, and I knew what she was about to say.

“John,” she said softly. “When you’re ready, it’s time.”

I buried my face in Lugnut’s neck and nodded. I could feel his heart racing, and the breath wheezed in his lungs. I knew he was struggling, that even though he wasn’t in full pain he still didn’t feel right. That every minute more that I lay there with him was another minute where he was confused and trapped on his side. The vet knelt down beside me with her equipment in her hand, and she didn’t say anything about the fact that I was still clutching him in my arms.

“It’ll be about a minute, once you say ok. He won’t feel anything, just drift to sleep.”

I took a deep, slow breath as I felt him shake beneath me.

“Ok,” I whispered.

Her movements were a blur. I felt and heard her giving him the meds, and I felt his body grow heavier in my arms, and then her footsteps were fading away.

Lugnut’s eyes started to slowly drift closed. Desperate, secret words poured from my lips as I stroked his face. “You’re my best friend,” I told him. “You knew that, Lug, right? You knew you’re my best friend. The only one who knows it all.” I kissed the top of his nose as he twitched more beneath me. His eyes looked into mine for one more moment before rolling back.

His chest was still rising and falling. “You won’t be in pain now,” I whispered. “You can play fetch as fast as you want, just like you used to. You can chase after all the birds.” 

I kissed him one last time as his chest went still. “You’re my best friend,” I said into his fur. “My best old friend.”

I knew the moment he was gone. His limbs went heavy beneath my hands, and his head thudded against mine. I blinked back the water in my eyes and held him for another long moment, gulping down the scent of him while his skin was still warm beneath my palms. 

There was a soft hand on my shoulder, and Molly’s ponytail brushed against my shirt. I waited for her to say something, but she didn’t say anything at all. She knelt beside me as I held Lugnut in my arms for a few more moments, trying to memorize the exact sensation of his fur between my fingers – burning into my brain the shape of his nose, and the lines of his ears.

I kissed his head one more time then rose to my feet. I didn’t look down at him, feeling somehow that he would be ashamed for me to see him sprawled out limply on the bed. It wasn’t Lugnut anymore. 

Molly, sweet Molly, didn’t try to talk to me as I walked outside. She didn’t try to hug me, or tell me it was alright, or ask if I was ok. Instead she held out a bag I hadn’t noticed had been sitting against the wall. 

“Some of his things,” she said. “His name plate and his ball – some other items from his hut.”

I nodded once, but I couldn’t reach out to take the bag. My hands were shaking where I kept them clenched at my sides. Wordlessly, Sherlock’s arm appeared in front of me to take it from Molly’s hand. I couldn’t quite meet her gaze as I tried to speak.

“Thank you,” I said. I’d meant to say more, but the words died on my tongue. She leaned forward up onto her toes and pressed a kiss to my forehead, then she nodded once at Sherlock before walking back into the office. 

I stood there in the darkness for another long moment. My eyes fought with me to turn and look down towards Lugnut’s hut – to see his old bed and the spot of shade where he’d slept. But all of it would be empty, and so I didn’t look.

I felt Sherlock’s hand on the small of my back again. I let him gently guide me to walk away from the kennel, back towards the truck without saying anything at all. He took the keys from his pocket and climbed into the driver’s seat, carefully placing the bag of Lugnut’s things on the back seat. 

Part of me wanted to tell him that I was fine to drive, but as he started the engine and pulled out onto the Road, I couldn’t find it in me to say anything, or to move. We drove back West, leaving the kennels at our backs, and I distantly wondered if I would ever go inside of them again. 

For an hour, I thought of nothing. I stared out the window at the black blur of the park at night and only focused on the breath flowing in and out of my lungs.

And then, in one flashing burst of panic in my chest, I suddenly wanted to scream that Lugnut was probably scared now that I’d left. That maybe he was still in pain, or looking for me, or alone back on that bed.

I couldn’t breathe.

“Stop the car,” I choked out. The panic rose up in my throat. Panic that he was scared and alone, that he was in pain, that he was _gone_. Panic that I had already forgotten the color of his eyes, or that the exact scent of his fur was forever lost back in that room.

Sherlock immediately pulled over and cut the engine, leaving the headlights on so we weren’t in the pitch dark. I burst out of the door and ran off the road, not giving a shit that I was sprinting into open tundra without any supplies. I ran for a few seconds and stumbled on the uneven ground until I reached a patch of flat grass, barely illuminated by the light from the car. 

And everything I had been holding back for the last three hours exploded in my lungs all at once. The world blurred before me and tilted on its side. Before I could stop them, huge, choking sobs started to vibrate in my chest before they escaped out my mouth. I didn’t even recognize the sounds pouring from between my lips – horrifying, wrecked cries as my brain repeated, “ _Gone, gone gone. . ._ ”

I covered my face with my hands and tried to breathe through it, but now that I had started I couldn’t stop. I cried harder than I could ever remember crying – harder than that night I’d spent on the floor of the little room in Canyonlands. I could feel every part of my body shaking out of control, and I desperately gasped for air as wet sounds choked my throat.

I knew he was behind me without even having to turn around. I could smell him in the night breeze, and feel his soft warmth against the cold. My chest ached so fiercely I thought I’d collapse into the dark grass. I don’t know why I started speaking, but my voice suddenly moaned through my hands.

“He’s gone,” I choked out, as if Sherlock didn’t know. My voice was wild and high-pitched. I gasped on another sob that squeezed the air from my lungs. My face was wet.

I turned to look at Sherlock, half-illuminated in the ghostly light pouring from the front of the truck. His dressing gown was blowing in the breeze, and I knew he must be cold. I stared at him and didn’t even try to control my voice.

“He was the only living thing that knew my other name,” I said. I saw something in Sherlock’s eyes crumple, and I took a stumbling step towards him, knowing my knees were about to sink into the grass. “He was the only one who knew,” I choked out again, and then I started falling, surrounded by the thick dark.

Warm hands caught me. Sherlock grabbed me by the arms right before my knees hit the ground and pulled me against him instead. For a moment I wanted to push back and fight. The urge to shove him away from me was almost overpowering, to yank myself back and stand on my own two feet. 

But his chest was soft against my cheek, and the familiar fabric of his dressing gown soaked up the tears on my face. I sank into him, throwing all of my weight into his arms. I didn’t want to stand anymore in the world. I didn’t want to breathe air in a place where my best friend didn’t exist. The vast, empty blackness of the tundra screamed back at me, more isolation standing there twenty feet from the Road than I’d ever felt on even my most remote backcountry trips.

And still, he held me. I choked out words against his chest, ones that poured out of me before I could even decide whether to say them.

“He didn’t know,” I said. Sherlock’s hands were firm against my back. “All those years, I left him so alone. He didn’t know that I . . . what he meant.”

For the first time in a long time, Sherlock spoke. “He knew,” he whispered into my hair. “John, he knew.”

“I should have moved back East,” I cried. “I should have adopted him – taken him out of the kennels and seen him every day. And I just . . .” I forced myself to speak over my closed throat. “I just left him there.”

I thought I felt something pressed softly into the top of my head – something like a kiss, but I couldn’t be sure. I let myself cry into the front of Sherlock’s chest for what felt like hours. I gripped handfuls of his robe in my hands as I melted into his body.

“He was the only one who knew my other name,” I said again in a rough, weak voice, as if that could somehow tell Sherlock everything – could explain to him the depth of what I had just lost. That part of my own soul was lying lifeless back on a dog bed in a dark office, waiting to be taken away where it would never see the sunlight again.

I needed Sherlock to _know_.

By the time the sobs in my chest had quieted, my eyes were painful and red, and my body was exhausted. I leaned away to try and pull myself together, but instead Sherlock reached out to hold my cheek in his hand. He lifted the corner of his robe and gently wiped my face, and I wanted to be irritated or embarrassed at being treated like a child, but Sherlock’s fingertips were on my cheek, and they were warm, and I couldn’t bring myself to care.

He walked by my side back to the truck, climbing back in the driver’s seat and waiting until I collapsed into my seat. He let me sit there and try to recover through the rest of the long drive – didn’t try to ask me how I was feeling, or whether I wanted to talk about it, or tell me Lugnut wasn’t in pain anymore. He just drove, and the headlights illuminated empty stretches of the ghostly park, and for one small moment, he reached over and put his hand on my knee. Just one moment.

Toklat was pitch dark and lifeless when we got back. Sherlock climbed down from the truck and grabbed the bag from the back, then motioned for me with his head to follow him up towards the cabins. We left the truck unwashed in the lot as we walked away. I kept waiting for Sherlock to branch off as we walked. Multiple places passed where he could have made for his own cabin. But he stayed by my side all the way to my cabin door, opening it with my own keys even though I had no memory of ever handing them over.

Again, I waited for him to set down the bag and leave – maybe turn on the light for me, or pour a quick glass of water. I stood in the middle of the floor and waited for the sound of his footsteps walking away. 

And still, he stayed. I let him guide me with his hands barely touching my back into my room. He sat me down on the bed. I was too exhausted to protest, feeling like a ghost and a statue all at once. Everything in me was raw, torn out and stripped down and then shoved back beneath my skin, as if I’d just released every tear I could have used over the last forty years all in one single hour. I heard him in the kitchen getting a glass of water. He kept all the lights off. He padded back into the bedroom and handed me a glass. Even in the dark, I could see that the front of his clothes were stained and wet from my tears.

I took the glass with a shaking hand. My voice was weary. “You don’t have to –”

“I do,” he said back in a calm voice. I didn’t argue.

I sat there in a daze as he continued roaming about the cabin. I thought I heard him moving the bag from Molly onto the table, and I thought I heard him pouring more water into the sink. When he finally came back in, I was still sitting in the exact position he’d left me. Something cool and damp was suddenly pressed to my forehead. I reached up to try to take the washcloth from his hands, but he gently pushed my arm back down and kept pressing it to my face. He held it over my burning, swollen eyes, then swiped across my cheeks, and held it around the back of my neck. His fingers never touched my actual skin, but they were close. So close. I leaned forward towards him where he knelt on the floor as he held the damp cloth against the back of my neck.

My clothes started to feel like heavy mud on my skin. As if I’d said that out loud, Sherlock suddenly rose to his feet. He opened my closet and pulled out fresh boxers and my normal sleeping shirt, not even hesitating to try and find them in the dark. He held them out to me silently, and I took them with grateful hands. Without any thought at all, I stood and immediately started stripping off my clothes right in front of him. Our eyes had both adjusted to the darkness, and he didn’t move away, and still, I stripped down completely naked not two feet from his body. The cold air shivered on my hot skin. He took my old clothes from me and tossed them over in the corner – something I used to nag him about but now just made my chest feel too tight. 

When I sat back down on the bed in my clothes and held my face in my hands, he still stood in the same place in the middle of the room. “John,” he said softly. “It’s the day for your shot.”

My spine tensed. I wanted to look up and ask how the hell he even knew that – how he could calmly stand in my bedroom after I’d just cried all over his shirt, how he could stand there for the first time in almost a year, and how he could possibly tell me that it was the day to take my shot.

Instead I just wearily nodded in my hands. “Yeah.”

His feet shifted on the hardwood. “You can wait until tomorrow, or I can bring it to you now,” he said. 

His voice was the only thing in the room that wasn’t numb. It wasn’t hesitant, or sorry, or muffled. It was just _there_.

Suddenly the thought of going without it felt like my entire being would disappear – that losing Lugnut and the shot in one single day would reduce me to my twenty-year-old self when I woke up the next morning. That Lugnut would look down on me from wherever he was and not even recognize me as the man who’d walked him his whole life.

I looked up from my hands and squinted in the dark. “I’ll do it now,” I said.

Without a word Sherlock walked back to my closet, immediately finding the pouch in the hidden place where I always kept it. He knelt by the bed and flipped on the lamp, bathing the room in a flood of warm light. I blinked hard and stared blankly as he got the shot out with steady hands. He effortlessly prepared everything before he handed me the ready syringe. For one flashing moment I imagined his hands holding a different syringe in his long, pale fingers, one that was reaching towards the thin vein in his own arm.

I blinked hard against the thought and reached out to take it. My fingers shook. I tried to steady them, hot shame flooding up my neck as he silently watched me struggle to hold the shot steady. Agonizing seconds passed where my hand struggled to get a grip, and then he reached up and covered my hand with his own. He pulled it from my hands and held it in his own fingers, then reached up with his other hand to push my boxers up on my thigh.

He looked up at me once, a silent, soft question. His eyes were open and clear.

I never wanted to look away. I nodded.

I watched as Sherlock pressed the shot into my thigh as if he’d done it ten million times. I thought of the last and only other time he had done that – when he’d reached up and cupped my jaw in his hands when he was done, and pressed wet kisses to my mouth, and groaned against my lips. As if pressing testosterone into my body with his own hands was somehow more erotic than all the sex we’d ever had. 

He looked back into my eyes after setting everything aside, swiping his palm once over the skin of my thigh before pulling my boxers back down. I could tell that he knew I was thinking of that last time. He was thinking of it too.

I nodded in thanks and he stood back up, cleaning up and putting everything away while I pulled back the covers and collapsed into my bed. I stared at the ceiling as I heard him moving about my room, trying to ignore the thought in my mind that it was probably the last time I’d ever hear his footsteps on my cabin floors. He flicked back off the light, and I waited for him to say one more small thing and then leave. For him to set a glass of water by my side, and gather up his things, and close the front door softly behind him to go back to his own world.

He stood in the doorway of my room in the darkness for a long minute. I couldn’t look his way.

His whisper broke the silence, and it wasn’t at all what I was waiting for him to say.

“Would you like me to leave?” he asked me quietly. There wasn’t any hint of what he was thinking in the way the soft words left his mouth.

I stared at the ceiling and held my breath. The silence that followed was heavy and thick, pressing down on my chest until my lungs struggled rise. Neither of us moved. 

When I finally answered him, my voice was so thin it was unrecognizable as my own. “No,” I whispered. Instantly the cold weight lifted off my limbs.

We didn’t say anything more. Sherlock quickly walked out into the living room and grabbed the extra blanket off the couch. I lay frozen on my back under my sheets as I listened to him pull his robe from his shoulders. He left on his shirt and his pants, even his belt. He climbed onto my bed beside me on top of my sheets, staying as close to the edge as possible and covering himself with the extra blanket from the couch. 

I held still as he settled his body into the mattress, afraid that if I relaxed I would automatically roll towards him and cling to his chest.

For a long time, it was silent, and neither one of us moved. I could tell from his breathing that he wasn’t anywhere close to asleep. I felt like I should be whispering quiet things to him in the dark. How grateful I was that he hadn’t left my side, how I had planned on walking to his door a few nights ago and begging him back into my arms. How Lugnut may have been the only one to know my name, but Sherlock was the only one who knew the taste of my bare skin.

But the words wouldn’t come. The silence was too fragile. Eventually I turned towards him onto my side in the small bed, tracing the outline of his body in the dark. His eyes were closed, and his chest moved in steady, even breaths. And I thought of a night when I had stared at the line of his back in a cold tent, when I had wondered if he was warm enough, and when the wind had moaned outside. And when I’d wanted to bridge the gap between us and pull him back into my chest.

But I hadn’t touched him then, not yet. Not that night. And I didn’t touch him now. 

I drifted off to a thick, tense sleep with my nose just inches from his shoulder.

-

I woke up once in the middle of the night. My sleep-fogged brain could still feel Lugnut under my hands. He was twitching, and crying, and desperately searching for me in the dark. No matter how hard I tried to hold him he always slipped through my fingers. I cried out for him to hear me – for him to know that I was there. My hands grasped wildly to get a hold on his soft fur.

And another pair of warm hands wrapped around my back. They held me as I moaned and tried to call out Lugnut’s name. They pushed my hair back from my sweaty forehead and wiped the wetness from my cheeks.

Finally I reached out and grabbed a handful of Lugnut’s fur. I clung to it desperately while I shook in the dark. And his fur felt more like soft cotton than it really did fur. But Lugnut knew that I was there now, and he was no longer in pain, and he wasn’t alone.

And right at the moment when I slipped back into deep, dark sleep, I felt his cold nose press to my forehead for a long moment. Only his little nose was warm, and it felt a lot like lips.

 

\--

 

I woke up late in the morning with a headache screaming behind my eyes. My face felt puffy and swollen in the hazy light. I stretched out tired, aching limbs beneath the sheets and rubbed my hands over my face.

And instantly, I remembered.

There was a soft punch to my gut as I struggled to breathe. It all flashed through my mind – the long drive out East, lying on the floor with Lugnut in my arms, that last look in his eyes, and tears on my cheeks beneath the stars.

The soft prick of a needle into my thigh from Sherlock’s hands. Warm arms in the dark, and curls near my face.

I threw out a hand towards the other side of my small bed, already grasping to get a handful of clothes or skin or curls. The space beside me was empty. I sat up, ignoring the throb in my head, and looked down at the perfectly straight outline of a tall body on top of my sheets. The blanket he’d used was folded neatly on the floor. I ran my hand over the empty bed, and the sheets were still slightly warm.

For a moment I wanted to call out and see if he was still there. Call him back to my side and beg him to slip back under my sheets. To pretend for just one morning that I still woke up with his curls against my cheek.

The cabin was completely silent, though. I knew he was gone. 

I struggled to pull myself out of bed. There was a full glass of water sitting on my bedside table and two little white pills. I left them there. I shuffled out in the kitchen and shielded my eyes against the sunlight. It seemed impossible that just last night I had stumbled in that same room with tears on my face – with the memory of Lugnut’s heavy body still clinging to my hands, and sobs in my chest, and Sherlock’s hand on the small of my back.

Everything in my kitchen was bright and clear, no trace at all of the fact I had come back last night missing part of my soul. There was a mug of fresh smelling coffee on the counter, covered with a small kitchen towel to keep it warm. I walked towards it blindly and held it in my hands, shivering as the warmth made its way through my bones. I took a small sip – it was thick and black, the way I always made it for myself.

I wanted to ask the blank walls of my cabin how long ago Sherlock had left. Whether he looked at me as I slept for a long time before walking away, or whether he took his own sip of the coffee in my hands before covering it with the towel to keep it warm and slipping out my door so I wouldn’t hear.

The rest of that day passed in a dreamlike daze. 

I wandered aimlessly from the kitchen table to the couch and back. I spent more than half of it sleeping, slipping back into empty, dreamless hours on the couch – hours where Lugnut wasn’t dead, and Sherlock Holmes hadn’t slept five inches away from my side. 

Whenever I woke up, I’d gulp down another glass of water, holding the cool glass to my forehead to try and remember I was awake. I stared at the ceiling and the walls and my hands. I stayed all day in the boxers and t-shirt I’d slept in, never even washing my face or combing down my hair. At one point, I started to reach into the bag Molly had given me, but the second my fingers touched the rough wood of his name plate, I pulled my hand out and collapsed back into a painful sleep on the couch.

By the time the sun was starting to hang low in the sky, my skin felt itchy and hot, and my cheeks were raw under my growing beard. My head still screamed at me, and my empty stomach ached. It felt like days had passed since I woke up that morning, and yet every time I woke up from another awful nap on the couch, my hand still reached out for one foggy moment to try to feel Sherlock beside me before I remembered. 

The fourth or fifth time that happened, something switched in my mind. I clenched my fist and heaved myself up from the couch, swaying on my feet as the blood rushed from my head. I rummaged around in one of my kitchen drawers and pulled out the old mirror I always hung up to shave. I forced myself to stare at my face in the crooked glass. My eyes were red and swollen, and I looked like absolute shit – as if I’d gone a hundred years without sleeping and even longer without a warm shower.

I heated some water on the stove and splashed it over my face and hair before brushing my teeth over the sink. I walked on sore feet into my bedroom and pulled on fresh jeans and a flannel over my exhausted limbs. The fabric rasped against my too-sensitive skin, and it felt painful to lift my arms. I reached for my bedside table to pull out the sock, but something unfamiliar prickled at the back of my neck. Without thinking I stood up and walked quickly over to the closet instead. I thrust my hand into the bundle of old clothes at the back of the closet floor until my fingers clasped around something cold and firm.

I slowly pulled it out. It looked exactly the same as when Sherlock had first handed it to me in the tent, looking at me with hopeful eyes as he curled my shaking fingers around it. 

“ _How . . .,_ ” I’d whispered. The flaccid looking thing in my palm, the _cock_ , had slowly begun to warm from the heat of my hands. I’d traced one of the veins on the pale skin with my thumb.

“ _They make these now,_ ” Sherlock had said. “ _Obviously I didn’t just order off the shelf. This has unique specifications. Made by the very best, and meant to last. I gave them your . . ._ ” He cleared his throat. “ _Your . . measurements. You just slip it inside and wear it in your pants, like you’ve been doing._ ”

And suddenly, hot shame had burned up my cheeks that I hadn’t even known that it was possible – that there were other people like me walking around with cocks in their pants, and I was a forty-year-old man with a pathetic, old sock making the bulge in his boxers.

Sherlock’s hand had brushed the hair back from my face. “ _You couldn’t have known,_ ” he said, knowing exactly what I was thinking. “ _Not living out here in the middle of nowhere like you’re a bloody hermit in the Bible._ ”

And I’d laughed, then, the tension in my throat suddenly gone. I hadn’t really thanked him, and Sherlock hadn’t asked if it was ok. And later that day, after we’d packed up camp and kept hiking, Sherlock had come up behind me when we were stopped for a break with our packs lying on the ground. He’d wrapped his arms firmly around my waist and pressed his hand over the new bulge in my pants. He’d traced it with his fingers and breathed hotly into my ear, and he’d cursed as I bucked my hips up into his palm and reached back to grip his curls. And I’d whispered in a dangerously rough voice, “ _Yeah, touch it. Come on, touch me._ ”

And he’d groaned back, “ _Fuck, you’re huge._ ”

I held it in my hand there in my sunny bedroom, letting my fingers slowly warm it back up. After a long moment, I unzipped my jeans and slipped it down into my boxers, fitting it up against my bare skin beneath my hair. It clung to my body the way it always naturally had. The warm weight of it after I zipped up my jeans burned low in my spine.

I glanced at my face one more time in the little mirror before I left. My eyes were still red around the rims, but less puffy. My face no longer looked like I’d just risen from the dead. The gravel exploded under my boots as I set off through camp. I felt like the entire earth was hovering beneath my feet – as if every ray of remaining sunlight was currently bouncing off my chest. I didn’t have time to be nervous.

I walked right up to Sherlock’s cabin door and took a deep breath, ridiculously relieved that I hadn’t run into anyone on the way there. My eyes had quickly gazed at Hannah’s closed cabin door on my way over. But then I’d thought of Sherlock’s hand on the small of my back last night as I entered the office, and I’d thought of soft lips in my hair, and I’d kept walking.

I knocked just once before I could lose my nerve. The door opened an impossibly short amount of time later. My hand was still hovering in the air in a closed fist.

“John,” he said instantly. He was fully dressed now in a clean button-up shirt and jeans, and I could smell the hair product still clinging to his curls. His eyes roved over me in one quick swoop, that way they always used to that made my toes curl in my boots. 

I let him look. “Sherlock,” I said back. My voice still sounded exhausted, but nothing like the night before.

He didn’t ask me if I was alright, and I knew that he could read everything in the lines on my face – the set of my shoulders and the curve of my spine. The little specks of water still clinging to my hair and beneath my jaw. 

I hadn’t planned on what I was even going to say, but the words poured effortlessly from my lips without even a thought, suddenly clear in a way my words hadn’t felt clear in a long time.

“I was wondering if you wanted to go out on a patrol this week,” I said. I refused to shove my hands in my pockets or pick at the sleeves of my shirt. “If you needed a ride,” I added.

He blinked hard twice, still staring at my face. Something flashed through his eyes, too quick for me to catch, and then he gently leaned against his doorframe, the way he used to what felt like decades ago. 

He gave me a soft look. “Depends,” he said in a low voice. “Will it be boring?”

A small smile lit up my face, chasing away the last bits of painful tears still hiding in the corners of my eyes. I rubbed a hand over my mouth. “I’ll try to make sure it isn’t boring,” I said back.

He gazed at me through the golden evening air. The space between our bodies started to hum. “I’ll hold you to that promise, Ranger,” he finally said.

My throat felt tight as I smiled back at him. I nodded my head as I began to step back down from his porch. 

“Deal,” I said. The answering smile in his eyes burst in my chest the same way it felt the first time Lugnut had ever licked my face. 

I knew as I walked away that he understood what I had come to say. 

That “ _If you needed a ride_ ,” had meant “ _I’m sorry._ ”

And that “ _Deal,_ ” had really meant “ _I miss you, and thanks._ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew, we made it <3
> 
> Bless little Lugnut, and I promise he isn't totally gone from the fic forever. If you're wondering when this WIP will end, I think I can safely say we're about 2/3 of the way through!
> 
> My deepest and most endless gratitude for trusting me with this chapter! I appreciate your kind comments more than I can say. I know I've been favoring writing more updates instead of responding to comments, but please be assured I read and devour each and every one, and they are the driving force behind this fic's fairly quick update schedule!
> 
> Next time: It's 1991, and Sherlock and John have *finally* kissed. Now we get to see just why this fic is rated *explicit* and not *gen* :)


	10. July 1991

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bluegrass: Listen to "Pardon Me" by the Cox Family [HERE.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUfLmtLQ6d8&index=6&list=PLPMbOXH7TtSSP7T1xoR7TQW8TY62_qhSJ/)
> 
> Sarah Jarosz: Listen to "Early Morning Light" [HERE.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7JlNrkRFKs/)
> 
> I'm deeply grateful to my two sensitivity readers, oxfordlunch and finnagain, who kindly and graciously lent me their time and wisdom. As a cis woman writing about the intimate experiences of a trans man, I wanted to make sure no biases or harmful thinking were seeping in, and that John and Sherlock's first time together was depicted in a healthy, positive, and clear way. 
> 
> oxfordlunch has been deeply supportive throughout this fic and provided me again and again with critical information, particularly regarding John's process taking his shot. You can find and support his writing on AO3 [here!](https://archiveofourown.org/users/oxfordlunch/works/)
> 
> finnagain wrote what amounted to a PhD-level thesis on the events in this chapter, John's thoughts and emotions, and John's specific interactions with Sherlock, and I will be forever grateful. You can find and support their writing and podfics [here!](https://archiveofourown.org/users/finnagain/pseuds/finnagain/works)
> 
> Lastly, huge thanks are owed to my medical beta, smirkdoctor, who graciously offered to answer any medical-related questions I had, and then not only didn't run away screaming when I sent her a novel-length email, but wrote me a textbook-level response that went above and beyond my wildest dreams. 
> 
> There are a few previous scenes and moments in this fic that might be very slightly changed based on the helpful feedback from the three smart people above, in case you notice anything changes. Any remaining errors in this chapter, and the fic as a whole, are entirely my own.
> 
> Enjoy!

July 1991

There were some days, like that fifth bright blue day of July, when I thought that maybe I’d gone and stolen someone else’s life.

I leaned back on my hands where I was sitting on a patch of warm moss, squinting in the sun and watching Sherlock off in the distance comb over every inch of an old kill site. The wildflowers wove a thick, fluttering carpet lying heavy across the earth, making Sherlock look like he was emerging out of a red and purple sea – bursting with foamy petals and warmed by the sun. 

Every once in a while, my eyes scanned over the horizon for any signs of movement – a lone, gentle caribou or a hawk flitting off into the sky. Far off in the distance, on one of the rolling green hills, a pack of Dall sheep rambled across the mossy stones like a handful of white pearls dropped to scatter and bounce down the slope. The pollen drifting off the wildflowers filled my nose with hazy perfume, and the clear, open sky sat like a ball of glass around the earth, pierced by the tallest point of Denali’s shining white peak, and cradling the whole park in a gentle, thin breeze. It was one of the most beautiful afternoons I could ever remember seeing in ten years of living there, and the most beautiful thing about it wasn’t even a part of the park at all.

Sherlock sat back on his heels and pulled the wide brim hat off his head, running a hand through his flattened curls and wiping the sweat off his brow with his forearm. I watched the thin linen of his shirt cling to his long, damp spine, tight around his chest and wrinkled from a full day of hard hiking. My own feet were aching and sore in my boots, and the skin on my arms and wrists was starting to burn in the sun. Our jug of water in my pack had long grown flat and lukewarm, and the mosquitos from the nearby glacier runoff were buzzing near my neck.

And I couldn’t think of any other time in my life where I had felt so calm – so right in my own bones and settled into my feet. Where I didn’t fear grizzlies, or sudden rain, or spine-chilling cold, and I wasn’t already aching for the dark silence of my own cabin, and I didn’t even care if I never ate a warm meal or took a hot shower again. I just sat there, leaning back on my hands which felt strong. I gazed back at Sherlock without looking away when his eyes landed on me from where he still knelt in the long, lazy grass.

He rose gracefully to his feet and walked my way, outlined by the sun with a halo around his skin. I shielded my eyes with my hand from the sun as I looked up at him standing over me, right before he sunk down to one of his knees, blocking the bright rays with his curls. Without a word, he reached forward and placed his fingertips on my forehead. He looked at me with steady eyes as he trailed his fingers along my skin, following the lines etched into my brow and the wrinkles at the corner of my eyes - carefully, and precisely, as if they were a map he needed to intimately know. 

Then he sunk his fingertips into the top of my hair. He stroked along my scalp, sending shivering, tingling waterfalls down my neck and spine. I closed my eyes as he brushed the hair back from my face, feeling each individual strand in his long fingers – my hair which was soft and hot from the bright sun.

It was nothing like the way my dad’s fingers had roughed up my hair when I was little – nothing like the way it had felt the last time anyone else had ever touched my hair. Back when my hair was long and curled at the ends, and the fingers weaving through them had had manure in the nail beds, and they’d twirled the strands slowly before tucking them softly behind my ear, catching on a little strand of hay stuck in the loose braid.

But Sherlock’s tanned fingers sank into my hair, for the first time in over twenty years, and I didn’t want to turn my head away.

When I opened my eyes again, and my gaze focused back on his face, I nearly lost my breath under the force of the look he was giving me. It was a look I’d seen about once a day since we got back from our backcountry trip just over two weeks before, after I’d watched him roll around on the ground with Lugnut for hours, pretending to be mad about getting even more filthy in the mud while secretly smiling over at me with his eyes. And after he’d stood up and brushed himself off, he’d glanced left and right to make sure we were alone before taking my face in his hands and kissing me on the mouth – somehow an answer and a promise all at once. And his fingertips had smelled of Lugnut’s rich, grey fur.

The look he was giving me now as his fingers trailed through my hair was soft, and earnest, and utterly still. He looked at me, and he knew that I knew that he _knew_ , and he refused, absolutely refused, to go and look away. 

It was a look that was the answer to some of the questions flying around in my head. Questions like why, even after we made it back to Toklat and real life, Sherlock Holmes still reached over to place his hand on my thigh whenever we got in my truck. Why he still waited for me leaning on his tree in the mornings, and sat slumped against my side when we stopped to eat trail mix out in the tundra, and why I always felt him full-body shiver whenever his lips met mine – those brief, few moments during the past two weeks when we would stand close together, as the only two people left on earth, and he would let me kiss him, just to remember the soft taste of his mouth.

But I wanted to do more than kiss him.

As I sat there and looked up into his pale, grey eyes – eyes which were tracing every line of my plain face – I wanted to put my hands on his shoulders, push him onto his back in the soft grass, and cover him with my weight until his bones melted beneath me. 

I wanted to press my lips to the place on his throat where the line existed between tanned skin and pale. I wanted to hear him panting, feel his hands gripping hard at my back, and I wanted to grind down on him, rub myself on his body at the place where he was hot and hard, and place his hands on my own bare skin, trailing through the thick hair covering my thighs. I wanted to taste the sweat that dripped down his spine to pool in his lower back, and taste the secret skin behind his knees, and taste the hair under his arm.

I _wanted_ him, in a way I’d never wanted another human being before. In a way that had me grasping my sheets in the darkness every night. Gasping as I imagined myself surrounded by smooth skin – piercing eyes staring at my freckled, bare shoulders and silk curls trailing across my chest. I wanted to know what it would be like to feel nothing but his bare skin against mine, touching me in all the secret places I kept hidden beneath my clothes – the crease between hip and thigh, the mole in the small of my back, the thin crook of my elbow and the hollow of my throat.

My chest.

And every time we kissed, every time he took me in his arms out in the middle of the park, or when I drew him closer to me in the shadows near my cabin before we parted ways after a long day out on patrols, every single time I thought it would be the day I asked for more. When I would sigh against his lips, and trace my thumbs over his hipbones, and whisper, “Please, let me. Sherlock, just let me . . .” 

And every single time, he’d pull back right as the warmth started to thrum low in my spine. He’d take a moment to catch his breath. And he’d say in a deep, breathless voice, “Well, Ranger . . .,” except he’d never finish the sentence, no matter how many times he started. He’d touch me one last time, somewhere innocent like a palm on my upper arm, or a squeeze of my hand, and then we’d slowly drift apart, putting space between us where before there had been none.

But I knew he wanted me, too.

The fire in his eyes when he’d open them after I kissed him – the sweet, heavy gaze that he leveled at me whenever I watched him leaning back in the grass, or when I shot him a glance side by side in my truck with one arm hanging out the window. The way he watched every move of my fingers and hands as if he wasn’t smack in the middle of a gorgeous national park. 

Sherlock looked at me like that, and suddenly I was sixteen years old again, when the fingers trailing through my long hair belonged to the boy who lived on the farm two miles away. And that boy was saying, “ _You know, Ranger,_ ” because he’d heard my dad call me that once, “ _I got a nice, soft mattress I hauled up into the barn last summer – way up in the rafters._ ” And on that long ago fifth bright blue day of July, I’d smiled and shifted the way I was lying on the grass, turning more onto my side so my hips curved up, and I’d said, “ _You gonna show me?_ ”

Sherlock’s look reminded me of that perfect day right before the sixth bright blue day of July, when I’d sat in the dark in my little attic, and my clothes from the day before had been dumped in a heap on the floor. When I’d pulled a piece of straw out of my hair, and then found the pair of my dad’s old jeans I’d stolen years ago and stuffed under my mattress. When I’d willed myself to forget everything, and felt the rough denim on my legs, and I’d placed a sock down into my pants for the very first time.

And it was that look in Sherlock’s eyes, dripping in sunshine and fresh air, that told me that one day, one day soon, I wasn’t going to let him pull back from our kiss.

But he pressed his lips to my cheek that day sitting in the grass under the bright sun, after running his fingertips through my warm hair. I didn’t allow myself to flinch, reminding myself that Sherlock’s lips in my beard was world’s away from that boy’s fingers twirling my hair. 

We shared a private smile even though there was nobody around for miles to see, sheltered beneath our eyelashes and kept hidden from the clouds.

“Well, Ranger,” he said.

I sat up and reached out to trace the delicate vein in his wrist with my thumb. “You ready?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. Instead he leaned down slowly and held my jaw in his hand, pausing for a moment before I tilted my head up to reach his mouth. His lips were dry and warmed from the sun. They felt like that first day of hopeful spring after a long, dark winter when I was just a kid – when I would sprint between the metal trailers before we moved to our real house, and kick off my thin shoes, and sink my bare toes into the freshly warmed soil, shivering when they reached down far enough into the earth to feel the cool, damp mud below. 

I could still taste the coffee I’d given him that morning on his tongue – the aftershave clinging to his cheeks by the corners of his lips and the salt from the sweat he’d wiped from his brow. I could taste the soft hum that escaped from his mouth – the one that told me that I wasn’t the only one who wanted to press him back into the grass. I rubbed my palm up his wrist as he kissed me, relaxing into the earth with the sun on my face.

And I let him pull back, like he always pulled back, and he didn’t kiss my cheek that time before gesturing with his head to start the hike back to the Road. Maybe I had flinched after all.

The sun was drooping low and heavy by the time we pulled into the Toklat lot. The back of my neck and my arms felt prickly from a full day under the sun’s rays, and my eyes felt warm as they blinked through the gathering dark. 

I yawned and rubbed my face as we walked away from the freshly washed truck. “Later than I thought we’d get back,” I said, for no reason other than to feel like I had a reason for Sherlock to stick by my side.

He glanced at me out of the corner of his eyes. “I estimate we would have been back around thirty-eight minutes sooner had you not driven us back like a grandfather and stopped for every miniscule rabbit that tried to cross the road.”

The laugh I tried to hold in still escaped in a puff of air. “Excuse me for preserving the wildlife and getting us back in one piece,” I said, smirking at him and shaking my head as we made our way through the trees.

He lifted his chin. “I’m simply alerting you how you can improve in the future. Getting back this late means you’ll barely have time for that overdue load of laundry you were planning to do before you settle down for your strict bedtime – even though you’ll spend the next three hours staring at the ceiling anyway before you actually fall asleep.”

I huffed as we made our way towards my cabin’s front steps. “I can tell you’re dying for me to ask you how you knew all that,” I said. For some reason, I winked at him. “So now I won’t ask.”

He frowned at me, but I could see a spark glowing in the corner of his eyes. “You’ll never learn if you don’t ask,” he said casually as he leaned against the wood post of my front porch.

I grinned and stood in front of him, angling us so we were mostly hidden in the shade from the trees. It was the way our evenings ended every single day – when I reached out and held him gently by the hip, and he kissed me goodbye, and we parted ways with brief words spoken about what time to meet tomorrow morning. When I felt like I was young and giddy and naïve, and something about it called to me in the hidden space beneath my chest. When I remembered how I’d felt in the brimming, gold moments right before I climbed up behind that boy into the hot, dusty barn. 

And suddenly, the thought of eating dinner alone at my little table felt like being cut off from the air – like the memory of the sun on my skin from that afternoon would be torn away from me, leaving me naked and cold. I needed to keep the scent of the pollen in my hair, the rasp of the grass against my ankles, and the dirt around my fingernails. I needed to _stay_.

I traced his hipbone beneath his jeans with my thumb and leaned in close. “Stay with me,” I said softly. I licked my lips and looked up hesitantly into his eyes, knowing I was breaking our unspoken rule that he spent his evenings in his cabin and I in mine – that this new thing between us existed out on patrols, and in the park, and even in my truck, but not in the silent darkness of our private worlds. 

Something flickered through his eyes. His fingers twitched in the small space between us, reaching out and tracing along the edge of my belt. He spoke slowly. “You want . . .”

“I don’t want to eat alone,” I said. The words felt foreign in my mouth, and all the more familiar for it – like ghosts that had been hovering at the edge of my tongue for decades and only now caught the breath in my lungs to find a voice.

I felt like I should feel vulnerable in the wake of those words, shrinking and embarrassed that I was a grown man afraid to eat at a kitchen table for one. But the look Sherlock was giving me was warm and strong, lifting my shoulders where they wanted to slump away. 

“I’ll stay,” he said, even softer than I had spoken.

Without another word I turned and unlocked my front door, casting a quick glance over my shoulder that no one was watching him enter behind me. My ears latched on to the sound of his socked feet on my wooden floors as he wandered inside. It was hardly the first time he’d entered through that door – that morning he’d jolted me away in my bed, and that day he’d huffed at me from across the room while we planned our first trip – and yet, I felt that the air in my cabin was feeling his warmth for the first time. That suddenly the bare wooden walls understood that I had kissed him – that this was the man who made moan beneath my sheets, and stare out the window each early morning with two cups of coffee in my hands, waiting impatiently like a little kid for the new day to begin.

I clenched my jaw before I could say something stupid like, “make yourself at home,” or, “feel free to sit.” Instead I walked straight into my kitchen and started getting out a pot and pan for the stove, setting the water I kept in the kettle to start boiling. I could sense him leaning against the doorframe to my bedroom, standing calmly, limbs loose, like he could stand there all night.

“You care what you eat?” I asked over my shoulder.

I heard a clear, “Nope.”

It was the last words we said to each other for a long while. He watched me silently make dinner for a bit from the doorway before moving to sprawl out along my couch, picking up one of the Alaska trail guides I kept on the small table and simultaneously flipping through a bird watcher’s journal, muttering under his breath and frowning whenever he found something he deemed incorrect. I cooked up a quick risotto from rice and some vegetables Molly had gotten for me when she went into Fairbanks the week before. Something I would never in a million years make for myself but which felt like something I desperately needed to do – to show him that I wasn’t just eating canned beans in the dark every night while I waited to sit by his side again in the morning.

Decades of cooking for one made my hands second-guess themselves as I pulled down two bowls and cut two pads of butter instead of one. I didn’t let myself look back at him as I stood there slowly stirring the rice over the stove, feeling like if I did I would only see an empty couch – that I had somehow imagined the fact that Sherlock Holmes was sprawled in my cabin in casual socked feet, with my books held in his hands, while the smell of the dinner for two I was making filled every inch of the close air.

I could hear him, though. Hear his fingers turn the pages, and his back shift against the couch, and his toes crack as he stretched them. I could hear him breathe. 

I set both bowls down on the table before looking over at the couch. He was staring straight at me with his curls in his eyes. I sat down and started eating like it was no big deal at all as he gracefully rose and glided across the room. His eyes flickered quickly over the table before he plopped down and immediately started eating without saying thanks.

A few minutes in, he spoke with a full mouth. “You’d never make something like this for yourself,” he said.

I shrugged down at my half-empty bowl and hoped he couldn’t see my cheeks turn pink. “Guess not,” I said. I ate faster so I wouldn’t have to say more.

“But you’re capable of it.” He leaned forward with his fork in his hand. “You didn’t even need to consult any sort of recipe, and you had every ingredient on hand.”

I waited for a few minutes to answer him, and he never pressed me to go on. I thought of long days spent peeling vegetables for my mom in the kitchen, or stringing beans, and of those quiet moments over the stove when her voice would be soft.

“ _You ain’t good at much, but you’re sure as hell better at all this cookin’ stuff than your sister_ ,” she’d say to me as she wiped her sweat on the kitchen towel and handed me the spoon to stir. I remembered the day I’d finally tried to make her a batch of her famous scones, and she’d slapped my hand hard when she saw that one of them was burnt, but then said that the rest tasted even better than when her own momma used to make them.

Sherlock had kept eating methodically while I went silent. Finally, I finished off my last bite and pushed my bowl away, swallowing down the buttery rice in my mouth and taking a swig of old coffee from that morning sitting nearby. “Haven’t exactly ever lived in a place where restaurants were close by, in case you haven’t noticed,” I said, looking awkwardly at the outline of his hands against his bowl and hating that I felt embarrassed over something as stupid as making dinner. “Literally decades of cooking my own food,” I added.

He hummed and leveled me with a steady gaze, holding an uneaten bite aloft on his fork. “Cooking for one,” he said, a bit too flat.

My eyes flickered to his, and I swallowed. “Yeah, cooking for one.”

I desperately tried to read what was in his gaze – something hesitant and soft, something _wanting_ without wanting to want. Something unsure.

Before I could process it he swiftly stood, grabbing both our bowls and heading to the kitchen. My gut clenched. I hoped against all hope he wasn’t about to insist he do the dishes, or try to clear up the washing as a repayment for the dinner. Somehow, the thought of that alone felt like it would erase the imprint of the afternoon sun from my skin – that it would wipe off the ghosts of warmth still clinging to my arms and leave them pale and cool, obliterating the memory of the entire day. I waited for the sound of him pouring water in the sink, or the sponge against the bowls.

Instead I heard him dump the dishes unceremoniously into the sink before he walked away, flinging himself back onto the couch with one arm and leg hanging off.

My heart soared. I looked at him lying there with one arm over his eyes, fighting the stupid smile on my lips.

“Do I have to invite you to come sit on your own sofa?” he mumbled.

I glanced at him to make sure he couldn’t see before I rolled my eyes. It was a habit I couldn’t break – one I hadn’t even realized I did until the day Molly looked at me oddly a few months into her first season, and she asked me, “ _Did you grow up in a house with a million sisters?_ ” And when I frowned, and said, “ _Just one,_ ” she blushed a bit and tucked her hair nervously behind her ear. “ _Oh, sorry then,_ ” she’d said. “ _Just sometimes . . . well, you know how we all pick up little habits from family when we’re young. Just certain little things – rolling your eyes, or standing with one foot turned out. You know?_ ”

And I’d fought to stay standing as I forced a smile on my face. I’d wrapped an arm around her shoulders, ignoring the sweat prickling on the back of my neck. “ _Is that how come you chew with your mouth open, kid?_ ” I’d said. And it wasn’t until later, much later that night, that I’d banged my head softly against one of the cabinets in my kitchen, and thought that after all the careful years of controlling my voice and my hands – all of the _decades_ \- that it was almost something as stupid as rolling my eyes that gave me away. 

I shook my head out of the memory and made my way to the bedroom. Sherlock was still sprawled out on the couch with his eyes closed. “Gotta get out of these sweaty clothes,” I said back, hoping that only a second had passed since he’d told me to come sit down. I glanced at the doorframe where I could see his feet on the couch. My finger twitched to shut the door against the light from the kitchen as I changed.

I left it open.

I grabbed some flannel sleeping pants and an old pullover Molly had gotten me from Kenai Fjords a couple years ago. The soft fabric inside was already starting to pill and wear out, but I wore it nearly every cold night all the same, especially back in Talkeetna, when the ice covered my bones. 

A part of me felt that walking out completely naked would be less intimate than letting Sherlock see me in these clothes – these clothes which I wore in the darkness of my room, and the privacy between my sheets, and the long nights alone. These clothes which no other human being had ever seen me in before. I wondered in the back of my mind if he would take one look at me and understand that.

He barely looked up as I padded back out towards the couch. When I hesitated, he sighed and lifted his legs straight into the air. I ducked under them to sit down on the couch, wincing when he plopped the full weight of his legs back across my lap. I sat there for a second with my arms awkwardly in the air. 

And in that quick moment, I felt that the entire evening had suddenly paused. That what I did next, whether I asked him to pick up his legs so I could shuffle off to bed, or called him an annoying dick and pushed off his feet, or lowered my hands to silently rub his sore ankles – that my choice would push whatever we had been doing for the last two weeks into something _else_. That in the span of a few seconds, we would either become colleagues who kissed each other goodbye or two men who woke up naked and entwined in the same bed. 

Sherlock’s breathing was slow and shallow. I could feel him pretending to study the bird book held lazily aloft in his hand, while really his muscles were tense, waiting for how I would respond.

And suddenly, sitting there staring down at Sherlock’s legs in my lap with my hands in the air, I thought of a memory I hadn’t thought about in years.

It was my first winter at my freshly built cabin in Talkeetna. I’d fucked up chopping the amount of firewood I’d need and ran out a measly three weeks into the season, making me have to pack up a bag in the twilight dark and climb on my mobile to cut through the walls of snow into town. I felt ashamed to buy firewood instead of chopping it down with my own hands, but it was better than freezing to death with nobody to find my body for four months. 

By the time I got to Talkeetna I’d been cold to the bone, soaking wet and numb and shivering across my skin. I’d crawled into the single bar in town and endured the teasing by the woman there I’d only met once before on my official trek out to the cabin for the start of season. Chena had taken one look at me with my blue lips and frosted beard and set a few fingers of good, spiced whiskey down in front of me. 

“ _So, you didn’t chop near enough firewood, huh?_ ” she’d said. “ _Rookie mistake. I’ve seen every damn tough guy in this whole bar make it their first year._ ”

I hadn’t stopped her when she set another shot in front of me. Or another. 

By the time the bar was full of the locals for their nightly drinks, my vision had been swimming, and my clothes felt too hot.

And there had been a man, sitting across from me at the other side of the bar. And I could feel his eyes tracing the worn lines of my hands.

He’d been tall and rough – huge weathered fingers and gentle lines around his deep brown eyes. He’d looked at me and looked, nodded over his pint with just the barest tilt of his head. And somehow, for some reason, I’d nodded right back. I’d slammed another shot back and gotten to my feet, swaying a bit as I made it towards the freezing alley out back.

I’d barely walked two feet when I felt a pair of warm hands grab the sides of my belt in a loose grip. My spine had melted as the man turned me around and pushed me back against the brick wall. I could barely make out his eyes in the dark.

“ _Say yes_ ,” he’d growled by my ear.

Fire had surged up my spine, warming bones which I feared would be stuck frozen forever. “ __Yes,” I’d whispered, and he’d kissed me.

I could barely remember the details as I sat there still on the couch, blinking with my hands hovering above Sherlock’s legs. I remembered the taste of stale beer on the man’s tongue, and the thick, heavy warmth of his cock under my palm. I remembered yanking open his belt and reaching into his pants, palming his bare skin and jacking him with my fingers. I remembered the sound of his grunts, the wet smears of his mouth along my neck. I remembered the hot spray of his come against my wrist. How everything had been sharp and pulsing and bright – how my body had plastered up against him just to feel every bit of his warmth, the heartbeat under his thick shirt and the raw callouses of his hands. How I’d moaned, lost in the zip of want up my spine. How I’d wanted to be the one pressing him back into the bricks, shoving my own tongue down his throat until he tasted Chena’s whiskey.

And I remembered his fingers reaching for my own jeans – flicking open my belt and pulling the zipper down. How he’d spit into his hand before starting to reach down my pants. And everything had grown clear, like dangerously sharp ice cutting through the whiskey fog.

I’d run. 

Barreled back into the bar to slam my money on the counter and grab my coat, then hurled myself onto my mobile and revved the engine in the pitch dark. The air had filled with puffs of smoky white cloud. I’d ridden back through the woods towards my cabin with numb hands, guided by starlight and praying I didn’t run across a bear in my path. I hadn’t even bought any wood.

And as Sherlock stretched to crack his pale toes in my lap, I remembered how I’d sat on my little bed in my one room cabin, shivering hard without a fire and watching my breath fog in the dark. How I’d scrubbed my palms against my own skin until I couldn’t feel the man’s hands still gripping me, and how I’d rested on my side still fully dressed in my clothes.

And more than anything, I remembered how I’d suddenly longed for his touch – for hands on my bare skin in the private silence of my cabin, holding me awake and gripping me close through the long night. I’d wondered, in a way I’d never even considered before, whether I could go back the next week and find that man again. Whisper to him through a bourbon haze what he’d find beneath my clothes, and let him ride behind me on my mobile, and follow me back home.

I’d wondered for hours, until the weakling sun rose for its daily peek above the clouds. And then I’d gone out and chopped more firewood until my hands were bleeding and sore beneath my gloves – too ruined for me to reach down into my own pants and bring myself off later.

“You’re remembering something.”

I blinked hard and ripped my gaze out of the darkness of my Talkeetna cabin. Sherlock was peering at me over the top of the book in his hands, looking as bored as possible when I knew he was anything but.

“You’ve remembered three . . . maybe four separate memories tonight – and one earlier this afternoon. Things you don’t normally think about,” he went on, when I didn’t answer right away.

We shared a long look, broken by the harsh ticking of the clock above the stove. Then I relaxed back into the couch, and rested my hands on his shins, pushing up the stiff fabric of his jeans to rub at the soft hair on his bare calves.

“I was,” I said softly. I kneaded into his muscle. “I did.”

He hummed and closed his eyes, not asking for anything more. I let my hands trace the tendons of his legs for a long, long time. Long past when the rest of the camp had drifted off to bed. Long past when my own eyes started to burn with sleep.

And I wondered, right before I felt my eyes droop closed, whether I was happy he hadn’t asked what I’d remembered, or whether I’d wanted him to ask for all of the memories, word by word. 

-

I woke up to the first rays of sunlight spilling through the thin curtains. 

Something felt off in the way my neck was twisting against the pillow, and the way my back sunk into the bed beneath the sheets. I rubbed my eyes open and blinked through the pale light, and I realized I was lying on my couch with a blanket tucked around my limbs. The warm smell of fresh coffee was coming from the mug on the little table, still steaming and covered with a kitchen towel to keep warm. 

And then I remembered, flashing through my mind like an old black and white film, how the last thing my eyes had seen before drifting off to sleep had been strong calves beneath my hands, and another pair of legs in my lap. I thought I remembered, through the thickest grey fog of my sleep, how those same legs had slid off me, and how hands with long fingers had pushed my shoulders down onto the cushions, leaning against something warm and soft like a chest. How curls had brushed against my cheek, and lips had pressed into my hair. How a body had sat beside me through the long, black night, holding me through it until it slipped away just before the dawn.

The couch cushions smelled like peppercorn and cedar. 

I jumped up to my feet and picked up the warm mug in my hands, cradling it while I stared out the window at the mist rising through the trees. We didn’t have plans to meet at all that day. Sherlock was meeting with Greg, Max, and Babs to review their latest finds, and I had the day-off again, one which I planned to spend out East.

I ignored the sudden, wild urge in my gut to burst into their meeting and kidnap Sherlock to drag him along all day behind me.

I moved about my cabin on silent feet, as if making any noise would scare away Sherlock’s presence still hanging about – like one loud bang or slam of the door would erase the fact that he’d spent the night by my side, watching me dream.

By the time I pulled up into C-Camp hours later, I imagined I could remember every second of Sherlock’s hands on my skin through the night. How he held me at two o’clock, and three o’clock, and four. How he must have looked when he slipped out of my grasp as the sun started to rise, and how he must have looked at my small sleeping body on the couch, and how he must have tiptoed through my kitchen while he made my coffee. All of it perfectly clear, as if I’d seen every moment with my own two eyes.

Lugnut was asleep curled up on the roof of his hut when I approached. I saw his nose twitch, catching my scent in the air, then he flopped over onto his back and hung his head off the roof, panting at me upside down with his tongue hanging out.

I sunk my fingers into the fur on his belly and tickled him with my beard. “Morning, old man,” I said. He yipped and gently pawed at my face before flipping onto his side and tucking his head against my neck.

I knelt and gathered him up in my arms. “Something happened last night, old boy,” I whispered into his fur. He squirmed and licked at my face. “Something I’ve been wanting even longer than I realized.”

Lugnut rested his face between his paws and gazed at me with his huge, grey eyes, ears twitching as they waited on the words from my mouth. And there, surrounded by still-sleeping sled dogs in their kennels, and kennel Rangers preparing the feed, and visitors flooding the Park Road, I told Lugnut all about how, for the first time in my entire life, I hadn’t spent the long night alone in my own cabin. 

Molly found me a while later during her lunchtime rounds. She plopped beside me in the dirt where I was sitting against Lugnut’s hut with him draped across my lap.

After a minute of silence, she bumped my arm and spoke.

“So. . .” she said.

I glanced over at her and frowned. “So. . .?”

She shot me a look. “ _So_ , how come you look like you just won the Nenana Ice Classic sitting in a kennel yard?”

When I frowned again, she rolled her eyes and smiled. “God, John, I know you love Lugnut like your own kid but he’s never made you smile at nothing into thin air before. For half a month now you look like you’ve been walking on clouds whenever I see you.”

My cheeks burned pink, and I wiped a hand over my mouth. I gave a small, awkward laugh. “Just having a good season, I guess.”

I knew that she knew I wasn’t telling her anything at all, but she let me get away with it, the same way she always had. She looked at me for another long moment, her soft eyes tracing the side of my face. 

“It’s nice to see you happy,” she finally said in a soft voice. I didn’t look up from my fingers massaging Lugnut’s ears in my lap.

“I’ve been happy,” I said, and I shuttered at the fake, flat sound of my voice. “Dream job, dream kid,” I nudged her, “dream girl.”

She huffed and slumped back against Lugnut’s hut behind us. “Men are impossible,” she said on a sigh. When I went to apologize she put her hand on my leg and smiled. “No, keep your secrets,” she said, cutting me off. “Just, whatever it is, whatever’s happening, keep doing it.” She squeezed my knee. “Unless it’s something illegal, then find something else.”

I laughed, surprised, and finally looked up from Lugnut’s sleeping face. “Nothing illegal, kid,” I said, and the dark, ironic part of my mind laughed at how much those words felt like a lie.

She leaned against me and tucked her knees up to her chest. When she finally spoke again, I could barely hear her over the sound of the other dogs barking for their food. “You, more than anyone I know, John, deserve to look this happy,” she whispered.

I burned at the back of my neck and cleared my throat. I tried for a joke, “Even more than your Greg?”

She laughed. “Loads more than Greg,” she said. “I may love him, but that man’s had his whole life handed to him on a silver platter. Barely even knows what it’s like to feel sad, from what I can see.”

The words spilled out of me before I could stop them. “And you don’t think I’ve had my own life handed over on a platter?”

The air froze. I heard Molly swallow slowly beside me. I wanted to take it back – suck my words back out of the air and say something else instead, how Greg’s one of the best men I’ve ever met, and how he makes Molly look like she’s the one walking on clouds, and how Sherlock Holmes held me as I slept last night on my couch.

She sighed. “I know I don’t . . . know about a day of your life before we met,” Molly said. She quickly looked at me. “And that’s fine,” she added. I made myself meet her gaze, and her eyes were serious and deep. “But I can see enough to know that you haven’t been handed any silver platters.”

My throat felt tight. I held on tightly to Lugnut’s fur with one hand as I reached over and patted her leg with the other. I didn’t try to cover up the fact that my voice was choked. “You know, kid,” I said, “I think you’re wiser than you look.”

She didn’t say anything more when she finally rose to go and finish her shift, just reached down and ruffled my hair with her fingers, and for a split second, as she walked away leaving my hair standing on end, my brain thought that maybe my dad’s fingers had just ruffled my hair instead.

 

\--

 

When I got back late that night, all of Toklat was asleep. I drove slowly into the lot to muffle the sound of my tires over the gravel, and I put off washing the car until the next morning when I felt more awake. I’d spent the whole rest of the day after talking with Molly making my necessary visits all around the East side - checking in at the offices and saying hi to the colleagues I only saw a few times a season.

My bones physically ached as I walked through the black trees towards my cabin – sitting at the top of the slope like dark ghost calling my name. For a moment I glanced over at Sherlock’s cabin across the way. A dim light was on downstairs in the front room. I could just barely make out the silhouettes of Greg and Max bent over a table, but nowhere else in the room could I catch a glimpse of curls. My hand twitched to knock, but I made myself keep walking by. 

The cold silence rushed against my face when I opened my cabin door, drowning my body in a wave of fresh dark. I left the lights off as I padded into the kitchen, flipping on the kettle to make a last cup of something warm before going to bed. I leaned my hands against the counter and looked down through the black, wondering why my heart was racing for no reason at all. Wondering why I wanted to hop on my mobile, and drive back through the snow into Talkeetna, and find the man sitting at the bar – and the man this time around would be tall and lean, with dark curls. And he would call me John when he wrapped his hands around my waist, and he would whisper, “ _I know_ ” as he palmed the front of my jeans, and he would sigh, and hold me close, and shiver beneath my touch. He would go back home with me, through the long, black night. He would touch me in my bed.

“How was your dog?”

I cursed and dropped the mug in my hands, wincing when the handle broke off and shattered on the wood floor.

Soft footsteps walked up behind me as I bent to pick up the pieces in the dark.

“That mug wasn’t your favorite, anyway,” said Sherlock’s voice again behind me. “You use it for that revolting mint tea you drink at night instead of your precious morning coffee.”

I shook my head as I gathered the shards into my hands and dumped them in the trash. I leaned back against the counter with my arms over my chest and tried to make out the silhouette in front of me in the dark. “I want to be furious at you for scaring the shit out of me,” I finally said. “Jesus, Sherlock, I could have decked you.”

I could almost feel his shrug in the silence. “Could have, but you didn’t.”

I smiled behind my hand as I breathed in his scent. The water in the kettle was growing cold again, and a secret part of me was hoping that Sherlock wouldn’t ask to put the kettle back on – to get down two more different mugs and still make the tea, as if he wasn’t here at all, as if the fact that I slept in his arms last night didn’t change anything about the way my life worked.

Instead he took a step closer on hesitant feet. “John,” he said. Something in his voice sent warnings up my spine. 

I swallowed hard, slowly making sense of the lines of his face in the dark. “Yes?”

He sighed through his nose. “I missed you today,” he said, as if he was disappointed about it.

My heart started beating, and I rubbed at my arm across my chest. “I’m sorry,” I said, feeling like every moment he’d ever felt unhappiness was suddenly my fault without really knowing why. “You know, you could have come with me –”

“No, you misunderstand me. I _missed_ you,” he said quickly. The dark grey lines of his body took another step closer to me in the room, and I watched his hands reach up to grab at his hair. 

“I missed you from the second I walked out the door this morning and left you on the couch, every minute I was listening to the inane babble of Geoffrey and Max with their collar data, the entire afternoon while I stared at the clock waiting for you to come back, every minute I sat in here in the dark waiting for you to open the door.”

His voice was growing frantic, and I tried to reach out to him with my hand. “Well you could have turned on a light,” I tried. When he didn’t laugh, I went on, “Sherlock –”

“And the entire time I just wanted to be here, with you. On your boring couch in your boring cabin with your boring dinners and your horrible, boring old jumper. Or sit in your truck on your boring patrols, listen to your boring tapes, and drink your boring water and hold your boring compass and bear spray while we hike.”

“Hold on –”

“I’ve never wanted to do anything _boring_ in my life, and yet here I am, when there’s a whole park full of wolves out there waiting for me to track and find them, and you’re more interesting than any of that – than any pawprint or kill site or piece of wolf scat –”

“Well, thank God I’m more interesting than a piece of wolf scat –”

“—but you just _stand_ there and I want to study it. I’ve kissed you for nearly three weeks at least twice a day, I know what your mouth tastes like, how your lips move. I’ve catalogued all of it and it isn’t enough, I want more. I want thousands of data points to study – thousands of repeat experiments on the way you hold the steering wheel of your truck, how you pour your boring coffee into a mug. I’ve seen every bloody animal in this whole park with you – even the most ridiculous little bird – and I want to go and see them all again. I want to watch the caribou herd move down the same slope at the same time in the same place every day, sitting on the same roof of your boring old truck.”

“Sherlock –”

“I want to sit on your boring, uncomfortable couch all night and not close my eyes for a second instead of sleep in my own bed beneath my own sheets –”

“Just wait a second –”

“—and I want to watch you pet your boring dog, and call him the same stupid names, and drink your same boring coffee –”

I reached out to grab his arm. “Sherlock –"

“And I don’t understand _why_!”

I kissed him.

His mouth was still hanging half-open from his speech, and the breath was shaking and panting in his lungs. He moaned when my lips met his in the dark, hands reaching up to immediately cling to my back. 

It was the same kiss I’d given him that bright afternoon in the backcountry – different, more wild, than all of the kisses that had come after. It was desperate, the way my breath traveled down into his lungs, and the way my face pressed against his, and the way our noses bumped. It was wet, and messy, and nothing like the way he’d kissed my cheek the day before under the bright blue sun. Nothing that made me want to flinch.

It pulsed and thrummed. I took two steps forward and gently backed him against the kitchen table, holding his soft face in my hands as I tasted his mouth. His hands were clutching at the shirt on my back, and his curls brushed against my face. A delicious warmth was starting to pool low in my gut– so much more overpowering than the one I ever felt lying face down in my bed in the dark.

I licked across his mouth. “Sherlock,” I whispered. A rough sound escaped my own throat as I leaned forward to kiss him again, and as I pressed myself against his body from our shoulders to our hips.

He pulled back.

I could just make out the glistening on his wet lips in the dark, and his chest was pushing against mine as he breathed. I could feel his heartbeat, mixing with my own, where I held him between the table and my body.

I gazed up at him, somehow unbothered that I wasn’t gazing down. “Why do you pull away?” I asked gently. I held the side of his face in my palm.

He frowned, and when he didn’t answer, something terrible clenched in my gut. My skin turned to ice, and I took a half-step back. My voice shook. “Is it . . . is it because of my –”

“Absolutely not,” he said quickly. He reached out and pulled me back closer to him. He closed his eyes for a moment with his hand still on the low of my back. I could feel the heat of his palm through my shirt. When he opened his eyes again, they were stripped and clear – a version of him I’d only ever seen before out in the middle of nowhere – eyes which I’d looked into just before we agreed to hold each other in the tent.

“I’ve never done this before,” he said quietly.

I stroked up his side and felt each one of his ribs. “That’s alright,” I started to say.

“I mean, I’ve never done this in this way,” he added. He reached out to place a soft hand on my chest, right over the beat of my heart. “Like this,” he said. “With . . . with someone who _means_ something.”

I understood immediately what he meant. I thought of lying in my dark cabin wishing for hands on my skin – hands which would understand what they were about to find beneath my clothes, and which had chosen to follow me home, and which would still be there in the morning. 

“I haven’t either,” I said. The words felt incredible, like pounds of weight lifted off my chest.

“I don’t . . .” Sherlock paused and took a slow breath. He leaned forward to rest his lips against my forehead. “If we do this,” he finally whispered into my skin, “I can’t go back to how we were before. If we really do this.”

An odd calm settled on my shoulders like a breeze, warm, clean water dripping from the place on my forehead where his lips touched my skin. “Me neither,” I said.

“I feel like I’m too old to be doing this for the first time,” he said, forcing out the words like they physically hurt him.

I held him closer and lifted up my face so our noses touched. “I’m even older than you, you dick,” I whispered, and the sound of his laugh filled the whole room with light.

“You have a point there, Ranger,” he said, and then he met my gaze, and then he kissed me.

My whole body sang. I felt his kiss at the tips of my fingers, and along the soles of my feet. I felt it beneath the tightly cinched scars on my chest, and in the hair under my arms, and behind both of my ears. The only sound on earth was the sound of his lips sliding against mine – the wet, warm sounds each time our mouths brushed, and the hot pants from our lungs, and the tiniest little sighs as our hips pressed closer together.

His fingers danced up each bone in my spine and traced the back of my neck. The shivers cascaded down my back, causing a fat, wet drop to slide from between my legs, pooling on the fabric of my boxers beneath my jeans. I didn’t twist away from the damp spot as it grew.

He moaned softly when I gripped a handful of his curls between my fingers, and he moaned again when my hand traveled down past his waist, tracing over the hot, hard length of his erection in his jeans as I panted into his mouth. I felt him grow harder beneath my touch, pressing like steel into my palm.

“Stay with me,” I breathed against his lips.

He rolled his head back on his neck and arched his chest against mine. “Yes,” he whispered.

He went boneless as I guided him through the darkness into my bedroom. He didn’t try to stop me as my steady fingers went straight for the buttons on his shirt, flicking open each one and kissing the new inches of bare skin. The hairs on his chest tickled my lips and rasped against my beard. He shivered as the cold air met with the wet streaks I left on his skin. He helped me shrug the shirt from his shoulders and tossed it into the black corner. My hands roved over the warm muscles of his stomach and chest, grasping at his shoulder blades and along his lean sides. 

“God, Sherlock,” I whispered. His skin was searing hot, nearly burning my palms. I listened to him gasp as I licked across his collarbone and tasted his throat. He laughed under his breath when my beard tickled his sensitive skin, and I brushed it harder across his shoulders until I could feel it leave a mark.

I felt his hands at my neck, fingertips hovering over the top button of my flannel shirt.

He paused. With shockingly steady fingers I reached up to hold his hands in mine. I gently guided them towards the cold, little button. “Please,” I whispered. 

I couldn’t fully see his face in the dark, but I heard the soft release of his sigh. His long fingers quickly opened each of my shirt buttons, revealing the undershirt I had on beneath. He kissed me as he did it, deep, rough kisses instead of tiny sips of air against my lips, as if he’d keel over and suffocate if he wasn’t tasting all of my mouth at once. I shrugged my shirt to the ground, and, before I could think twice about it, I grabbed the bottom of the tank top and pulled it up over my head, shivering a bit when it rustled to the floor.

And for the second time in my entire life, I was bare in front of another human being.

And for the first time in my entire life, I was bare in front of another human being with a flat chest.

He didn’t hesitate. The second my shirt hit the ground with a soft thud, he grabbed me around my back and pulled me against his bare skin, shivering when the muscles of our stomachs collided. He chased my mouth with his lips, and pressed his erection into my hip, and all I could feel was the heat of his skin on mine – the intimate brush of the soft hairs on his body, and the way his chest molded against me. The way fire zipped down my spine when I felt our nipples touch, and the dry, rasping sound of our bodies moving together. 

He was trembling. I heard the click and rasp of his belt, and suddenly his jeans were falling in a heap to the floor and being kicked away by his foot. His underwear followed. I sucked in a breath when the bare skin of his penis pressed against my lower belly, aching and rock hard where it rubbed against my skin.

I looked down, even though I could barely see anything in the dark. “Look at you,” I whispered. My voice was unrecognizably low. “Fuck, look at you.” He moaned when my hands roved over the bare skin of his back, drifting down over his full ass to grab onto his thighs. I wanted to hold all of him at once – memorize every inch of skin, every dip of bone, and every hair. I wanted to cover every part of him with my lips and my tongue, taste the shivers on his skin, and know the length of each bone.

“John,” he whispered. It was the first thing he’d said since, “yes.” His voice sounded wrecked and breathless in his throat. I kissed him again, and his lips lingered on mine for a long while. He held the back of my neck, fingers threaded through the ends of my hair, as he tasted me, again and again, so softly I could feel the quiver of his lips. And those ones were somehow the loudest kisses of all.

He rubbed his cheek against mine and ran his palms up my arms. I suddenly wanted to feel the whole weight of his body on mine – to hold every piece of him in my arms, safe and strong. I gently walked back until my knees hit the edge of my small bed. I faced him. I could hear him panting in the silence. Slowly, methodically, I reached for my own belt. My fingers didn’t shake as I undid the buckle, and pulled down the zipper, and pushed them down to the cold floor. 

And suddenly, I was standing just inches before him with only my underwear covering my skin, painted by the darkness and hidden within the walls. I was wearing one of my pairs of boxers where I’d sewn a pocket into the front, keeping my bulge safe and close against my real skin. I resisted the urge to reach down and adjust it, or to cover the whole thing with my hand. I swallowed hard against the urge to feel ashamed.

I was no longer up in that barn with my hair down to my waist. 

I was no longer on my stomach in my empty room on cold sheets. 

I was not afraid. 

“I can see you,” he suddenly whispered, and even though there was no possible way he could see me in the dim light, I understood what he meant. I understood everything he meant.

I kept looking at him as I slowly sat down on my bed. I reached out for him, and he immediately stepped closer, his legs on either side of my knees. I traced his bare thighs with my hands. “You’re fucking gorgeous,” I said, finally saying words I had been meaning to say for weeks.

And suddenly, Sherlock was climbing onto the bed and straddling me with his legs. He sank down onto me, and his erection pressed into my lower belly. I clutched at his sides and back with my hands as he arched his hips, dragging the pre-come leaking out the tip of his penis across my stomach.

“Look at you,” I said again, as if it was the only sentence I knew how to say. I grabbed at his thighs and his ass as he scooted closer to rub himself against me. My own thighs were trembling not to thrust upwards towards his body – the crease of his bare ass hovering just above my crotch which I desperately wanted to sink myself into, to feel the tight heat of him as I pressed closer into his body.

I reached up and grabbed his hair and kissed him instead. He made a desperate sound in his throat as my tongue pushed into his mouth. His hands gripped helplessly at my shoulders while I moaned against his lips. I felt that maybe I could go on like that for eternity – with Sherlock Holmes naked in my lap, and his cock against my skin. With his hungry moans and breathless sighs filling the close air of my cabin while I licked into his mouth and traced his tongue with my own.

And then, before I even realized what was happening, Sherlock’s hips moved _down_.

He rolled hard against me as his ass sank into my lap. I bucked my own hips up without thinking, and my bulge pressed up into the warm space between his buttocks, desperate to come into contact with some part of his bare skin. 

And through the fabric of my boxers and the thin, rolled sock, my aching, swollen skin suddenly brushed up against his tight hole.

I gasped. A sudden pulse of heat shot down my thighs. I was throbbing in my groin, and my underwear felt soaked through and wet. Sherlock cursed under his breath above me, leaning down to press his cheek to mine as he rolled his hips again, sinking even lower across my thighs. I leaned back to angle my lap so I could thrust, and again, my own body pressed up into the warmth of his ass.

“Fuck,” I heard myself groan. I knew he could feel me through the layers of fabric, wet and erect and fucking up against his body. I gripped his hair. “Oh god. . .”

I frantically licked and bit at his neck as he clutched my shoulders and moaned. His cock was rock hard where it still pressed into my stomach. He pulled back to breathe from my frantic kisses. “Christ, you’re hard,” he whispered in a rough voice. He moaned and rolled his head on his neck. “God, you feel . . . I can feel. . . _fuck_.”

I ached beneath the sock, and the damp spot grew wetter. The feeling of it covered over the mild blush spreading across my chest as I continued to thrust against him. It somehow felt like the most intimate thing I’d ever done – the most naked and vulnerable I’d ever been – to press the soft bulge into his skin, and know that he was feeling my real, erect body underneath. My real body which was hard from thrusting up into the perfect crease of his ass. For him to realize how desperately I wanted it to be real – for him to really feel it inside my underwear, and know that it was me. 

For him to feel fucked. 

And still, he rocked himself above me in a rhythm with my own hips, and still he panted and whispered, “ _Christ, you’re hard._ ”

I couldn’t hold him up for much longer. My breath trembled in my lungs. I held him by the shoulders and gently pushed him off to the side before gliding his back onto the bed. The old wooden floorboards creaked softly under our weight. I covered his body with my own, and my ears tingled at the sound of both of us sighing at the new touch. It felt like lying down upon the fresh, warm earth, sinking into the mountains to help hold the heavens up in the sky. It felt like the first time my Ranger uniform had covered my fresh, new chest, or the first time I backpacked alone my first season in Denali, when I’d woken up with the dawn, and gazed out of the tent flap over the sage mist, and silently shed a tear that _this_ was my new home.

It felt like the day I sat beside my sister in the flat summer air of our trailer home, back when we were young, and still played together with dolls, and put braids in each other’s hair. Back before she grew older and tattled to our parents that I’d cut the hair off all my dolls to make them boys with the kitchen scissors. It felt like when our toes mingled together in the warm, fresh dirt, and I’d told her how I wasn’t really her sister at all. And she hadn’t blinked an eye, or even given me an odd look. She’d just said, “ _You may be my brother, or whatever, but I’m still older than you, so I get first pick._ ” And I’d told her that she could have her choice of Jell-O flavor the whole rest of that summer, and that I’d eat the one she didn’t want.

It felt exactly like that, as I let my full weight rest on top of Sherlock’s warm skin. I kissed him deeply and pressed him down into the mattress, settling my body on top of him until his full cock pressed between my legs. 

“God, John,” he said under his breath. “Fuck, you feel . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence, just moaned as I gripped a handful of his hair.

I tasted his tongue and rolled my hips slowly on top of him, pressing my bulge along the full length of his erection. I dragged myself across him, from the base of his cock to the tip. He cursed and grabbed my ribs, arching his back and his hips up against me. His cock was still full and leaking.

I was trembling in my thighs, aching harder than I ever had before in my life. I could feel myself throbbing, thick and swollen and wet within my boxers. I wanted to be surrounded by him, to feel the wetness from his soft, open mouth. I wanted to press him into my sheets, and also be trapped between his body and the bed.

The thick darkness amplified the sounds coming from his mouth – the gentle brush of his skin against mine. I could hear him panting, and feel the hot breath from between his lips fan across my throat. I kissed him again, and his lips were swollen beneath mine. I continued grinding myself on top of him, pressing one of my legs between his so the place where I was hard would press closer to his cock. I leaned down to drag my lips slowly along his throat. He gasped out loud when I dragged my beard across his skin, covering his shoulders before moving down to his bare chest. I caught a peaked, hard nipple between my lips and sucked, lapping it with my tongue until his hands grabbed my back and shook out of control.

“Fuck,” he breathed by my ear. His fingers gripped at my hair. “Touch me,” he begged. His voice was high and shaking. “John, touch me –”

The air left his lungs in a moan that rattled through my chest as I reached down and grabbed him hard in my hand. He twitched against my fingers, and I shivered at the warm, heavy weight of his cock in my palm. He held the back of my neck and kept my face close to his, lips brushing as we both breathed, and I stroked him with my hand. I found a quick rhythm to the roll of his hips, to the beat of his breath across my tongue. He held me there as I swiped my thumb over his wet slit, and dragged my fingers through his thick black hair around his cock, and rubbed my palm over his tight balls. Nothing existed in the world except the small space between our bodies – no light, or other sounds, or sensations beside the feel of his hard cock pulsing in my hand. 

I kissed him as his breathing sped up to feel him pant into my mouth. “Come on,” I whispered across his tongue. My hand sped up as he fucked up into my fist. He was shaking, wild sounds escaping from the back of his throat. “Come on,” I said again. I bit his bottom lip as I gave him one long, slow stroke, “That’s it. . . that’s it . . . feel me on you. . how tight. . . _come_ on –”

His wide, grey eyes shone for a moment in the dark, latching fiercely onto mine for an eternal second before he threw back his head on his neck and came. Hot semen covered my hand and my wrist, and a long, desperate moan escaped his throat while his hips pressed up harder into my hand. I watched him, breathless, as he came apart beneath me, frozen with the knowledge that something as simple as my hand on his skin had caused something so beautiful to happen – that I was witness to Sherlock Holmes at his most naked and stripped down, lying cradled in my bedsheets, and begging for my hands to feel his skin.

I brushed his sweat damp curls back from his forehead and kissed him beneath his hair as he panted to catch his breath. Then I reached down over the bed and grabbed the first shirt I could find to wipe off his belly and the come on my hand and wrist. I collapsed next to him and quickly pulled him into my arms, tucking his head onto my chest while he gripped me with his arm. 

For a long while, we just lay there. Our heartbeats gradually slowed until they were in sync. I could feel the warm press of his lungs against my side, and the slick of the sweat between our bare skin, and the heavy weight of his thigh draped over my leg. I played with his curls with my fingers, forbidding myself from thinking about anything other than how lovely he felt – the solid, warm weight of him, and the smell of his sweat and come filling the darkness of my unsuspecting little room.

He sighed deeply against my chest and pulled me closer with his arms. I could feel his limbs growing heavy, drifting off to a calm sleep.

Then he sat up suddenly and turned to stare down at me in the bed. His hand hovered over the middle of my chest. “John, did you . . .?”

He didn’t finish the question, and I didn’t need him to. I squirmed a bit on the bed, and I waited until I knew my voice would sound normal. 

“It’s alright,” I said. Because it _was_ alright. Because Sherlock had just orgasmed in my arms, in my bed, and he’d let me rub the place between my own legs against his chest, and over his erection, and he’d told me I was hard, and looked me in the eyes, and unbuttoned my shirt.

He was silent for a long moment, and my fingers tingled, body fully awake. Finally, he leaned down and brushed his thumb across my beard and cheek. “Do you want to?” he asked.

The softness of his voice made my chest suddenly clench in an odd pain.

Yes, of course I wanted to. 

I wanted to let him feel me come in his arms. I wanted to be hot and hard against his palm, be inside of him, feel him clench around me as he came. I wanted to look down at his huge hand and see him holding our cocks together, side by side. I wanted him to suck me, to choke on me, to beg me to take him on his back. I wanted to look fiercely into his eyes for an eternal second before I let myself go. I wanted to be stripped and naked and seen by only his eyes, even in the dark.

I wanted to _come_ , and not by rutting against my own sheets while I imagined invisible voices beneath me.

I was still swollen and pulsing between my legs inside my boxers, clenching my thighs just barely together to try and hold it at bay.

I let my thighs relax, and I took a deep breath. What I was about to say felt more terrifying than the first time I’d tried to introduce myself as John, way back in South Dakota to the woman behind the desk at the work office, the day before I’d left it all and headed for the ranching job near Wounded Knee, and she’d taken one strange look at me with my fresh buzzcut and my cap pulled down too low, and she’d said, “ _But ain’t you the Watson’s younger daughter?_ ”

I swallowed hard over the sudden fear in my chest and sought Sherlock’s grey eyes in the dark, waiting until I could be sure he saw me looking. My palms sweat. 

“Yes,” I said softly. I swallowed again. “I want to.”

I waited for the embarrassment to overtake me – that I was a grown man, in my own bed, and I was asking to come the same way a little kid would ask for more supper. But before it could rush in and choke up my throat, Sherlock’s lips were on mine, moving soft and slow.

He kissed me for a long time. Until my body arched up into his, and my hands clung to his warm spine, and all I could feel was his heartbeat echoing into my own chest. And as his kisses grew rougher, and deeper, and wetter, his fingertips danced along my sides, and up my arms, until I was shivering across my bare skin.

His lips moved slowly down the side of my neck, tasting the skin and sucking it between his lips. My hand reached up to hold the back of his neck closer to my panting chest. “Sherlock –” I tried to say, but I could barely hear my own voice. He hummed and moved lower, slowly, meticulously tracing every line of my collarbones with his tongue. I gasped when the cool air brushed against my wet skin. I could feel my nipples pearling, and my hips gently rolled up into his. He trailed his soft fingers through the hair on my chest.

He kissed my body for what felt like hours. He tasted every inch of my stomach and ribs, and blew hot air across my skin. It felt like being covered in the first rays of spring – that morning every year when I would wake up in my cabin in Talkeetna and the faintest rays of dawn would be pushing their way through the grey clouds. I shivered beneath his mouth, the same way I always shivered that first time my feet crunched down into the Denali gravel.

It was freeing – letting myself be seen in the pitch black of the dark – letting myself be touched by his careful hands. 

It was intoxicating, until it wasn’t. 

I gasped when his full, hot lips closed around one of my nipples. My spine tensed. I could barely feel the wetness from his tongue – or the soft brush of his lips. He felt me hesitate, and he paused to look up, mouth hovering above my skin.

“You know I can’t really feel that,” I said, hoping my voice wasn’t filled with the longing I suddenly felt. 

He frowned. I hated myself that I’d wiped the blissful look from his face, wishing I could travel in time to five seconds ago and take it all back. 

He looked quickly down at my chest, and I saw his eyes briefly trace the scars etched in my skin. I could practically hear his mind whirring, trying to figure out exactly how it was done.

“Just . . . after that,” I said, hating that I felt the need to fill the silence. “I can’t really feel . . . there.”

His eyes were piercing and clear when he looked back up at me through the dark. His thumb rested just to the side of my left nipple, which was still slightly peaked in the air. “I didn’t know,” he said softly. There was a hint of disappointment in his voice.

I reached up and ran my fingers through the messy curls on his head. I smiled, trying to smooth the frown between his eyes. “Even _you_ are allowed to not know everything under the sun,” I said.

I grinned, but he didn’t smile back. He barely even blinked. “I should have known,” he said. “I should have figured it out. I was too . . .” He bit his lip while he searched for a word, and a sudden wave of affection overcame me.

“Distracted?” I whispered.

A small flame lit in his eyes. “Yes,” he said back. His voice was rough and low.

I stroked his cheek with my thumb, and I felt the tension in my spine flow away. Just when I was about to pull him back up to my mouth, he spoke again, looking straight up into my face.

“Do you want me to kiss you there?” he asked.

The question stole the breath from my lungs. I swallowed a few times, trying to figure out what my mind was trying to say. I thought of the last time anyone had kissed me there, back when there was skin to hold on to, and there had been straws of hay stuck in my hair, and the hands on me had smelled like fresh dirt from the fields.

I thought of sitting in my attic afterwards wearing my dad’s jeans over my thin legs. I thought of staring at my pile of clothing and thinking in the dark, “ _never again._ ”

I thought of Sherlock’s fingers in my hair the day before, tracing my face.

“Yes,” I finally said in a low whisper. “I want –”

I couldn’t finish what I was saying before his warm, wet lips kissed softly over my nipple. He moaned when he moved his tongue over the skin. I closed my eyes and breathed, one deep, slow breath. He swirled around it with his tongue and sucked while tracing the other one with his fingers. I pressed my chest up into his mouth, searching the wet heat, imagining I could almost feel the zip of want down my spine. I listened to the wet sounds of his lips as he licked and sucked, and a part of me could _feel_ it, thrumming with delicious warmth in my chest – the same part of me that could feel it whenever I cupped myself through my jeans.

He kissed it one last time before moving his lips lower, kissing right over my scar as if it wasn’t even there – he didn’t trace it, didn’t avoid it, just covered it with lips before moving down to my ribs, dragging his mouth through the hair on my stomach as he stroked up my sides. 

My skin sang under his mouth, until I was shaking and aching in the place where I was hard. My soft sighs felt muffled and safe in the room, mixing perfectly with the sound of his wet lips instead of alone and vulnerable in the thin air. I felt his warm hands working their way down towards my legs, thumbs tracing over my bones and along the waistband of my underwear.

I wanted to feel him.

Something wild overtook me. Before he could press down and feel between my legs with his hand, I reached beneath my boxers and slowly pulled the sock out of its pouch. Some of the thin cotton was wet.

It felt like the longest two seconds of my life. I waited for him to ask if I was sure, or to tell me I didn’t need to – for him to look at me with concerned eyes and hesitate before touching my real skin.

Instead he kissed my mouth before I’d even dropped the sock down onto the floor, and without any pause at all, the heel of his palm rubbed across the small place where I was swollen and hard. He traced it with his fingertips through the thin cotton of my boxers, as if there was something there to actually stroke, as if I could barely fit beneath the wide space of his palm. 

He sighed into my mouth as I arched up into his hand. I ignored the wet sounds coming from between my legs, telling myself I was leaking, dripping to be inside him. Warm waves of pleasure thrummed down my thighs as he stroked his fingers over me. My toes curled. 

I wanted to be embarrassed at how quickly I was bucking up against his palm, but I couldn’t feel that way, not when he was stroking me and moaning into my ear, and not when he wasn’t pulling back from the soaking wet spot lower on my boxers, and not when he was panting, groaning, “Fuck, John, you’re hard. Come in my hand . . . fuck my hand. . . _Christ_ you’re fucking hard. . .”

I gasped against his lips as the warmth pooled low between my thighs, and he stroked me one more time with his fingers, long and slow, and I clutched a handful of his curls, and I came beneath his hand.

“Yeah, that’s it,” I heard him whisper – felt him breathe into my mouth. “Fuck, John, come on me.”

An embarrassingly high whimper escaped from my throat as my orgasm rushed through me, pressing myself harder up into his warm palm as I pulsed against his hands, leaking onto my boxers. I held on to his bare skin on top of me like an anchor, the only thing keeping me tethered to earth instead of rocketing off into the dark sky. I knew I was squeezing him hard enough to bruise, and he didn’t pull away.

I hadn’t realized I’d been holding my breath until the last of it fizzled out through my fingertips, and I released all the tense air in my lungs as he rubbed his hand in a soft circle one last time between my legs. I twitched underneath his touch, feeling suddenly that even the fabric of my underwear was too sensitive against my skin. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d come like that in my life – where it had consumed me, and frozen my lungs, and gone on like wave after warm wave through my shaking limbs. 

I collapsed against the pillow. I wanted to reach up and rub my hands over my face, but I felt somehow that I needed to keep my face open and clear – that if I stopped him from looking now, we would never be this way again.

He looked down at me for a long, soft moment, one hand carding through my hair and the other resting on my ribs. I could smell myself on his fingers which were weaving across my scalp. Finally, through my warm haze, I realized he was waiting for an answer to an unspoken question.

I shifted my tired body to the side and reached down to grab the kicked-down sheet. 

“Sleep here,” I said. 

He collapsed beside me immediately, placing his head on my chest the way he had done before. Our skin felt too hot beneath the thick sheet, but he didn’t pull away, and I pressed my lips to the damp place just under his hair.

I knew, just like I’d known that first week in Denali that Lugnut would become my dog, that I didn’t have to thank him at all for what he’d just done – that it was the least necessary thing on earth, like thanking the oxygen up in the sky just for being there to breathe. 

He was heavy on top of me. His curls tickled my cheek. I wondered in the back of my mind if my beard had left pink marks on his pale skin.

“I’ll be here in the morning,” he rumbled softly against my chest. I heard it for what it was – the heads up and the warning, the understanding if I got up right then and put a t-shirt back on, or if I asked him to leave before the dawn painted my room with light.

I didn’t reach for a t-shirt. I wrapped my arms tighter around his back. “Good,” I said. Just as sleep was starting to pull me under, I suddenly needed to make sure I’d been perfectly clear. 

“Don’t leave before the sun comes up,” I whispered into his hair. “Not until I’m awake.”

I felt his lips form a smile against my chest. He settled closer against me, throwing a heavy leg over one of my own. “I always listen to what my Ranger tells me to do,” he mumbled, and I felt him drift off to sleep just as the last word was leaving his kiss-swollen lips.

 

\--

 

He was still there in the morning. 

I watched him for a long time after I woke up beside him, with his curls plastered against my cheek and half his limbs sprawled across me. The sheet was kicked down around both of our waists. He was lying on his stomach, and his breath tickled my shoulder. I could barely see the tips of his eyelashes beneath a mop of sleep-soft curls. The morning light streamed through the small bedroom window and painted gold across the sheets, illuminating the tiny dust mites swirling in the air and blowing warmth across his skin. It shone over the dark freckles scattered low across his back, and it frizzed around his hair like a golden halo through the grey. It illuminated my bare chest.

I didn’t reach down to pull up the sheet.

I thought of nothing but the feel of his lungs rising and falling on the mattress as I watched him sleep. For long stretches of time I just closed my eyes and listened, amazed that something as simple as someone else’s breathing could sound so revolutionary – so impossibly real.

He twitched his nose for a minute before fluttering his eyes open. I watched with a soft look on my face as he reached up to shove the curls out of his eyes – eyes which locked on to me a moment later and widened in quick surprise. I saw the thoughts flit across his face – that this wasn’t his bed, and that he wasn’t alone, and that we’d fallen asleep right after having sex. 

And then, before I could even clear my throat to whisper a good morning, he rolled over immediately and took my face in his hand. He kissed me, sleep-muffled breath and all, and his lips were dry and chapped from the long night of sleep. His mouth gently caressed mine, tongue just barely seeping out to wet his lips before he kissed me again, tender and soft. It was nothing like the kisses we’d shared the night before. Nothing like the kisses out in the backcountry, or at the end of the day hidden by my truck.

It was bare. It was sleep-slow and velvet and soft. It was entirely new – the new reality of waking up together naked beneath the same sheets. His thumb stroked my cheek, and I let myself reach out to trace the curve of his sharp hip. The muscles in my body were beautifully sore, and I could feel an ache behind my shoulder where his hand had gripped me the night before.

His eyes when he finally opened them again looked like the twilight sun hitting the glaciers – where everything that was steel and grey was suddenly filled with a glowing light, and the ice reflected the rich moss, mixed with the luster of the rising stars. 

And instead of a soft good morning, or a, “last night was good,” Sherlock licked his lips and spoke in a deep rumble across my pillow. “Your job is unbearably hateful.”

I laughed before I could stop myself – a light and breathless little sound. I shifted closer to him and sighed when he reached out to stroke the hair on my chest. “Why is that?” I asked him.

He tried to frown, but the softness on his face still shone through. “Because you’ve got to spend the day stopping idiots from getting eaten by bears, despite the hundreds of colorful signs warning everyone of the dangers of bear safety, when instead you should be spending your day in bed with me.”

I laughed again, and for the first time in years, I let myself freely roll my eyes. I reached out to place a warm hand on his arm. “And what would the great Sherlock Holmes want to do in a boring bed all day?” I asked.

He shot me a look. “Have more sex, of course,” he said quickly. “Because I think you’d agree that we were wildly successful. In between rounds you can tell me about your hopes and dreams for the future if you want to fill the time in a more stereotypical way –”

He stopped talking to glare at me when I slapped his arm. I rolled over fake-groaning further onto my side and rubbed my face with my hand. “God, you’re impossible,” I said. “You always like this with people still in bed first thing in the morning?”

When he was silent, I pulled my hand away, and I realized what he was going to say just by the look in his eyes. “You wouldn’t have anyone else to ask that question to,” he said softly.

I leaned across and pulled his face closer with my hand so I could kiss him. It was the best answer I could give. He softly hummed beneath my mouth.

I stroked his face with my thumb as I looked into his eyes, licking my lips over the taste of his kiss. “I’ll be late for my shift,” I said, and instead of arguing, he nodded.

I kissed him again, and he reached up to hold my wrist where I touched his face. “I’ll pick you up in the afternoon if you want to re-visit the site near Stony,” I said. “I’ll be done with patrols by then. We can stay and watch the caribou after.”

He blew a stray curl away that had landed in his eyes. “And if I watch your boring caribou with you later, you’ll let me sleep here again?” he said. I could hear the faintest bit of hesitation hiding in his voice.

I gazed at him, willing him to understand everything I was about to say. “Deal,” was all I said, but I knew that he heard so much more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *fans self* We made it! I promise there is plenty more sex to come with these two, both in 1991 and 1992 :)
> 
> I am deeply, deeply grateful for all of you reading this fic! You have sent me incredibly kind feedback, personal stories, and travel aspirations. You have cried with me over Lugnut, squee'd over hot Rangers, and shared your love of Ranger John and Researcher Sherlock. You've kudos'd, and rec'd, and made art, and left comments, and I'm happily blown away :)
> 
> I'll admit, I'm pretty anxious / interested to hear if you all enjoyed this chapter! I know it's been a long lead up to their first time, so I would LOVE to hear any comments you have <3
> 
> Thank you thank you thank you.
> 
> Next time: We're back to 1992, where Sherlock is taking John up on his renewed offer to go out on a patrol. I wonder how it will go?


	11. July 1992

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bluegrass (sort of): Listen to "Wildflowers" by the Wailin' Jenny's [HERE.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pz91iizX6_A/)
> 
> Sarah Jarosz: Listen to "Jacqueline" [HERE.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMyJu2ZVfkY/)   
>  
> 
> I hope you enjoy this chapter! 1992 is getting more and more hopeful. . .
> 
> ***Brief heads up: mentions in this chapter of drug overdose and (very brief) suicidal thoughts. If you'd like to skip, you'll see it coming right after Sherlock brings up Greg in the canoe, towards the very end. (I promise that will make sense in context)
> 
> Thank you so much for reading and enjoy! :)

July 1992

They gave me a whole week off.

I wanted to decline it when Nick first told me with his arms crossed over his chest in the dim light of the evening office. I’d gone straight there after walking away from Sherlock’s cabin door, wanting to make sure that my schedule was in place for me to be able to take him out on a patrol.

When I knocked softly and entered, Nick looked like he was seeing a ghost.

“Watson,” he said, and it sounded more like a question.

I nodded briefly and walked straight to the wall of schedules, praying that he could read my body language to go on with business as usual.

He didn’t.

“You won’t, uh. . . won’t find anything up there for yourself, if that’s what you’re looking for,” he said, still awkwardly sitting half-turned to me in his chair. “Gave you the week off.”

I stopped myself just in time from saying something stupid, like, “ _But I told Sherlock I’d take him on a patrol, and I never thought he would want to do that with me again, and I don’t know if he’ll still want to do it if a whole week goes by._ ”

Instead I tried to act too casual in the too small room. “Aw, don’t need to do that,” I said. “I mean, I . . . well, you know, it’s a good thought and all. Appreciate it. But I’ll be fine. Rather just get back to work, you know?”

I expected him to bow out and simply hand over the schedule, but instead Nick moved to sit half-perched on his desk and fully face me, crossing his arms over his chest with a long breath.

“See, we knew you’d say that,” he said, almost smiling.

“We --?”

“Me and Hooper.”

I swallowed thickly. “Oh, did she –”

“Called me first thing this morning saying something along the lines of ‘John Watson is, under no circumstances, allowed to hop back in his truck and go on patrols for a whole week. And when he fights you on it, you tell him I’m ordering him to go out on a damn hike or something instead’.” Nick chuckled under his breath. “Believe she added something along the lines of ‘and tell him to shave and do laundry so he doesn’t look like a hermit living out in the woods. He’ll scare away all the wildlife’.”

I laughed suddenly, for the first time in what felt like a hundred years. I thought of Molly rising first thing in the morning to make sure she called Nick before he wrote the week’s schedule, with the memory of me lying on the floor holding Lugnut’s body probably still burned fresh in her mind. I rubbed at my face – the slowly filling out hairs on my jaw.

“Well, if Molly demands it . . .” I gave a small shrug.

Nick nodded and winked at me and said, “Good man,” as I gave a small wave and walked back out, fighting the urge not to just walk right back up to Sherlock’s cabin and tell him that they gave me the whole week off, for the first time in over a decade, and I couldn’t take him out on a patrol if we waited that long, and maybe we should just skip it and pretend I’d never asked him at all.

The whole week off sat heavy in my gut. It felt too extravagant – something you’d give someone who just lost a relative, or whose kid was in a car accident. Not some greying bachelor who just lost not-even-his elderly dog. The few other Rangers and staff milling around Toklat that evening gave me long looks as I walked past back up to my cabin, nobody calling out to say anything but nobody ignoring me either. Their eyes were knowing and sad – as if they themselves had been beside me in the room when Lugnut’s little eyes rolled back.

The week off and the looks – it made me feel like there was a Park-wide secret about me that everyone knew but myself. That even though I barely talked about him, and walked him on my own, that everyone somehow knew, the entire world knew, that he wasn’t just some dog to me. Not even close. 

It made me feel naked. It wasn’t like my love for old Lug had ever been some secret, but suddenly I felt like my need for him had been stripped and exposed from my own naked skin – that I was being paraded around in front of the Park with a visible, bleeding heart, and everyone suddenly understood that that sled dog who passed away the other night was the only living thing on earth who knew about my unknown past.

They looked at me, and tried to catch my eye, but I couldn’t look back. 

I didn’t turn the lights on when I got back to my cabin. Just felt around in the dark and drank a mug of weak mint tea before falling into bed, painfully aware that every little ounce of joy I’d felt on Sherlock’s porch was slipping away out through my fingertips – disappearing into the dark. 

I didn’t touch the bag of Lugnut’s things on my kitchen table for two more days. I spent those days mostly milling around in my cabin – catching up on reading I told myself I was going to finish way earlier in the season without really seeing a goddamn word on the pages, and doing some cleaning I’d been putting off for years. I took one full afternoon and drove back out to Cantwell for groceries, leaving the windows down the whole drive and wearing my old King Salmon hat. 

I slowed down a bit on the drive back to the Park when I passed the turnoff from the Highway where we’d brought Lugnut last summer – when I had still been sweating in my seat that we were going to get caught and Sherlock had been relishing the single cigarette I’d let him smoke out the window during the drive. I wanted to go back down that road and find the little clearing again – see if the sun still hit the long grass in the same way. If I could find the outlines of two bodies and a dog still etched in the soft ground, a permanent reminder of our once existence in the earth.

The old pick-up truck behind me honked loudly twice before speeding up to zoom around me across the opposite lane. I blinked out of the memory and watched the taillights speed away and disappear into a cloud of dust, leaving me far behind.

I drove clear past the turnoff without stopping to pull off. I fought with myself the whole drive back to the Park Entrance not to look back in my rearview mirror, as if the turnoff would always be just a half-mile behind me, hidden among the bursting green trees and begging me to come check and see if it was still there – if it had even existed in the first place.

That night I sat at my kitchen table and held Lugnut’s name plate in my hand for a long, long time. The black paint was peeling on the surface of the sanded wood, and I could just barely make out the thin lines of glittering silver paint outlining each letter. I traced one of the letters with my thumb.

Molly had painted it for me way back in her first season. She’d been given the task of assigning the dogs to their walkers for the summer, and nobody had thought to clue her in that Lugnut always went to me, no matter what the random drawing said. So when I’d showed up at the end of the first week of work to walk him, and Lugnut and his leash had been gone, I hadn’t had a clue as to how I was supposed to track down the poor new girl who’d sat next to me at the staff meeting and somehow demand that she ignore the rules and switch him back to me. 

I’d spent a whole week walking one of the other dogs, Cache, and visiting Lugnut whenever I could during my spare time. Then I’d arrived one early pre-dawn morning with Cache’s leash in hand to find Molly waiting for me, freezing in a too-thin jacket near Cache’s hut. She’d apologized ten times in a row before I could even say good morning, and said she hadn’t known as she pulled at her hair and blushed deep red, and then she’d handed me a brand new name plate for Lugnut’s hut to replace the old one which was splintered and faded.

“Oh, you didn’t have to –”

“I did,” she’d said. Then she’d given me a hard look and stomped her foot once in the cold gravel. “So, now that I’ve done my part and apologized over it all, you tell me this. Why the hell didn’t you say anything?” she’d demanded, faint blush on her cheeks long gone.

I’d rubbed at my neck and fiddled with Cache’s leash in my hand. “Well, I didn’t . . .”

“You were just gonna go the whole entire season letting somebody else walk your dog? And you weren’t going to tell me to just switch it back?”

“He’s not _my_ dog. And I guess I would have eventually –”

“—and you were just gonna let me walk around all season as the ‘new kid who took John’s dog away from him’?”

“No one would have thought that –”

“I mean, hell, I thought you and I were becoming friends, and you couldn’t even tell me –”

“We _are_ becoming friends, it’s not that, I just –"

“You wanna get a beer?”

I’d stopped and stared at her in the freezing morning air. “It’s six o’clock in the morning,” I’d said.

She’d rolled her eyes without even really moving them beneath her lashes. “ _Tonight_ do you wanna get a beer? At the Spike?”

I’d stood there dumb like I’d just been asked to move into Lugnut’s hut. Her simple little question had run through my head like the most complex thing I’d ever heard. 

“I don’t . . . well, I don’t really –”

“Don’t really what? Drink beer? Have friends? Exist?”

And for some reason, I’d burst out laughing, echoing towards the crystal sharp mountain peaks in the morning fog. I’d traced one of the letters on the new nameplate with my thumb, and said, feeling foolish and happy, that I would meet her at eight. 

That night, four beers in at a rickety table in the corner of the bar, with Molly’s knees pressed against mine in a way that felt all kinds of right and not a hint of wrong, she’d laughed with sparkling eyes and said I was the most mysterious person she’d ever met – that she felt that I was the imaginary best friend she’d always wanted when she was a little girl and never had. And I’d laughed and reached out to touch her thin wrist, and held back the wild, reckless, tipsy part of me that wanted to blurt out, “ _You know we could have braided each other’s hair if we were friends when we were little?_ ” and instead said, “I wish you all the luck in the world to try and figure me out then, kid.”

Lugnut’s name plate now looked almost as faded as the old one had, splintered at the corners and bleached by the sun. I wanted to do something ridiculous like sniff the wood deep into my lungs, or sneak out my tongue to try and taste his fur hidden in the old grains. Then I thought of Sherlock, ass up in the air with his face two inches from a clump of fur, holding a clod of dirt in his hands and licking some of it into his mouth. And instead of making me laugh or groan like I had nearly every day last summer, the memory of it only made the nameplate feel two hundred pounds heavier in my hands. 

That night I dug an old beer out of the back of my fridge, and cracked it open on my countertop in the shimmering evening dark. I heard Molly’s laugh from all those years ago in my head as I drank – her high, tinkling voice that first real night of our friendship.

I heard her voice on the phone, saying “ _John_ ” and “ _You should leave now._ ”

I finished the beer too fast. I shut my bedroom door, climbed into my bed, and tucked my sheets around my skin before that one beer could turn into two. The darkness choked my skin – thick and shrouding like the bottom of a black glacier sea. And I remembered, just before my red eyes finally drifted off to a fitful sleep, how my bed had felt so different, so much larger and warm, when his body had been on the other side, breathing in tandem with my own lungs.

 

\--

 

I woke up the next morning to a soft knocking on my bedroom door. For a long minute I buried my face in my pillow and tried to convince myself that none of it was real - that I was still dreaming, and that when I fully woke up my cabin would be empty and silent. 

I reminded myself, for what felt like the hundredth time, I couldn’t leap up and get dressed to go visit Lugnut for my day off, because the fact I had a day off in the first place was a reminder that he wouldn’t be there. He wouldn’t be lying there on top of his little hut, sniffing me in the air. He wouldn’t exist for me to hold in my arms, or hear him bark as he chased after the birds. He wouldn’t groan and pant as I rubbed his face in my hands. He wouldn’t hear my voice – wouldn’t know all that I needed to tell him, or that he was the only one I ever told. 

The knocking kept coming, a bit more loudly now.

“John?” I heard through the door.

The sound knocked the breath from my lungs. I barely turned my head so my mouth wasn’t pressed against my pillow. “Yeah?” I said softly, unsure if he could even hear me. I was terrified to move – as if I was in a deep dream, and any movement would rip me awake from sleep, back to a reality where Sherlock Holmes would never be outside my bedroom door again.

There was a shift on the other side of my door, though, as real as anything on earth. Then I heard what sounded like a body sliding down to sit on the creaking wood floor. I waited for Sherlock to keep talking for what felt like a long time – longer than it seemed he’d ever waited to speak before. 

Finally, I heard him clear his throat, and the wood of the door creaked as his back pressed against it. 

“Are you awake?” I heard him ask.

I knew that he knew full well I was awake. I couldn’t answer. The tone of his voice sounded just like it had after our first ever real night together, when he’d turned to me in the morning light and mumbled, “ _Your job is unbearably hateful._ ”

“You’re probably not answering because you know that I know you’re awake,” he went on.

I smiled into my pillow, even though my eyes were sad at the corners. I suddenly felt that I needed to sleep for two hundred more years – that the weariness I’d felt lying on the cold floor next to Lugnut would take centuries to recover from. That I’d never move again.

“John,” he said again, even softer than before.

I shut my eyes.

“John, I find I have a lot to say,” he said. “Would you like me to tell it to you?”

I nodded, even though he couldn’t see me. “Alright,” I whispered. He probably couldn’t even hear it.

I heard a deep breath from the other side of the door, then:

“Well, first of all they’ve given you the whole week off, which you’ve reluctantly agreed to only out of some misguided attempt to make Molly pleased, even though you initially wanted to refuse since you’d much rather get on with your job than sit in your cabin and stare at the blank walls – mind you, I don’t blame you for that. One week is embarrassingly extravagant. Makes you seem like a widower or like you’ve never come to terms with death. And this now leaves you to wonder if I’ll even still want to go out on a patrol with you if more than a week has passed, the answer to which I’ve broken into your cabin yet again – and you really need to consider your appalling levels of security – to tell you that, yes, I will still accompany you on a patrol no matter how many weeks have passed, but also that I’m incredibly impatient, and there’s a brand new kill site out near Unit 4 which Garrett refuses to take me to, stating he has something ridiculous to do like drive Molly to Fairbanks instead, and if you don’t take me to it today I’ll end up having to hitchhike on one of the busses like some common visitor, by which time all of the actually interesting information will have been trampled on by unsuspecting tourists wearing yellow visors with disposable cameras, and we’ll never know which wolf pack passed through that Unit, and which direction they went, and the entire conceptual ecosystem I’ve spent the last year and a half building would be missing a giant puzzle piece, and it would be entirely your fault.”

I lay frozen in my bed as his voice washed over me like a wave, fighting away the last wisps of heavy darkness still clinging to my skin. He sounded haughty, and arrogant, and far too confident that early in the morning. He was bursting and loud – filling up every inch of space in my little cabin, until the only air I could breathe smelled like his skin, and felt like his hands. He was so _sure_. So alive. 

He was also sitting down on the cold wooden floor leaning up against my closed door, knocking softly to wake me up, and with a hint of nerves in the back of his voice. I suddenly wondered what his face really looked like on the other side of the door – if he had his eyes closed or open, if he looked as confident and bold as he sounded, or if he was soft, waiting and hoping that I would answer him back. Hoping, just like I was hoping, just to stand in the same room as each other.

I sat up and rubbed my face with my hands. I cleared my throat from morning roughness. “So, what I’m hearing is, the entire Park will go up in flames unless I drive you to this site today, huh?”

I felt the warmth of his smile through the door. His relief.

“Obviously,” he said. I heard him rise quickly from the ground. “You’ve been itching for an excuse to leave this cabin for days. You even went _grocery_ shopping two and a half weeks before you were even close to running out of your supplies. You’re worried you’ll run into people around camp who will embarrass themselves trying to ask if you’re alright, however I can assure you that if you walk down to your truck with me nobody will come within five feet, since I took the opportunity of enlightening everyone at a staff meeting yesterday that Jess and Nathan have struck up a secret affair. We’ll be perfectly left alone.” He waited a beat, then added, awkwardly as if talking to a visitor. “And I hear the weather will be . . . splendid.”

I laughed, realizing belatedly that I had already risen out of bed and half-dressed without even noticing my movements. I slipped the real-looking cock into the pocket in my underwear for the first time in almost a week, and shivered at the press of the cold surface up close to my skin.

“Alright, alright,” I said. I shrugged into my flannel and started work on the buttons. “Calm your horses, I’ll be out in a minute. Just need to make some –”

“I already made your coffee,” he said. The door flung open right at the exact moment I finished doing up my top button, as if he could sense through the door precisely the moment I was fully dressed. Our eyes locked immediately across my small room, causing everything to stand still.

My swallow sounded like the entire Toklat river smashing against Denali’s rocky slope. For one blinding, fierce moment, I thought that I was going to walk forward and grab Sherlock by his shoulders – pull his body against mine and kiss him breathlessly in my arms. I thought I was going to throw him down on my bed and cover him with my skin, hold him down whispering, “ _Please stay. God, please don’t leave._ ”

He let me stare at him. Finally, after what felt like an hour, I looked away, reaching into my closet to grab my jacket off its hook. 

“I feel like I’m having déjà vu,” I said quietly, half-looking at the floor as I pushed my arms into the sleeves. “You bursting into my room first thing in the morning, breaking in and demanding me awake to drive you God knows where.”

I looked up at him hesitantly after I spoke, knowing that I had just thrown out the biggest offering in my life – that we had never talked about ‘before,’ not out loud, not like that. 

His eyes were knowing. I knew that he was remembering that very same morning – well over a year ago when he had woken me up in the darkness, and when I had yanked up the sheet to cover myself before walking out into the kitchen without anything in my boxers at all.

And, at the same time, I knew that neither of us were thinking about anything that came after – not the countless, endless mornings later during that summer when Sherlock woke up in my bed, wrapped in my arms. When his voice in my room was still the thing waking me from sleep. When he pulled me on top of him, muscles sleep-heavy, and traced the lines of my back with his fingertips while we had slow, quiet sex. 

No, we were just thinking of that one, single morning. The “ _Wake up, Ranger!_ ” and the “ _Drive yourself_ ” and the “ _Please, will you take me?_ ”

I smiled at him, the barest curve of my lips. He smiled back.

“At least this time I knocked,” he said as I walked past him out into the kitchen. 

I huffed and shook my head gently as I picked up the mug waiting for me on the counter. My whole body tingled at the first sip of the thick, black coffee. I kept my back to him as I spoke, feeling like I was about to step off a high cliff straight into the endless clouds.

“That’s good,” I said, a bit under my breath. “Giving me a heads up so I can preserve my modesty.”

My heart hammered waiting for his response. For him to ignore me, or say “ _that’s all over now,_ ” or laugh. For him to declare, in that sharp way of his, “ _That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard, John. I’ve seen you naked, you know._ ”

For him to step closer.

He stayed right where he was, but I heard the little chuckle in the puff of air out his nose. “Of course, Ranger,” he said softly. I heard him gathering up my bag with supplies so we could get ready to go. “You know I value decency above all else.”

I turned to laugh at him when suddenly the mug in my hands was ripped clear out of my fingers. Sherlock downed the last few gulps of my coffee then set the empty mug down on the counter with a wince, wiping his hand over his mouth.

“Christ, that’s still revolting,” he said, before shouldering my bag and flinging open the door.

I followed him, feeling like I was floating through an old dream – one I’d had as a child, and adored, and thought I’d lost the day I became an adult. “So finishing a man’s coffee for him, that’s decent, too?”

He didn’t look back as we crunched across the gravel. “Obviously. You were taking far too long.”

I felt myself rolling my eyes as I jogged to catch up. “Well, did you bring the –”

“I brought the extra bear spray and compass, yes.”

“And the –”

“Enough water for 3 bloody days, yes.”

“And your –”

“Christ John.” He slowed his steps to look at me over his shoulder. “What else on earth do you think I’ve possibly forgotten?”

I smirked at him, half-wanting to leap up and fly clear into the sky. “Was just going to ask you if you remembered to bring your fucking common sense,” I said, glancing at him sideways out of the corner of my eye.

He groaned and shook his head. “Oh, for god’s sake, that’s horrible –”

“Oh, John!”

We both stopped in our tracks as Hannah and Jess appeared from around the next bend. The giddiness I’d been feeling all morning instantly left my limbs, leaving my insides dry and crackling under my skin.

The look on Hannah’s face reminded me of everything I had forgotten – that I was just a Ranger who lived alone, that I’d spent the last week half-asleep in my cabin. That I wasn’t really _with_ Sherlock Holmes, not anymore.

That Lugnut was gone.

I felt Sherlock tense beside me. He took a half-step closer to me in the gravel – close enough that I could feel the heat from his body through the sleeves of our shirts. 

“Hannah, Jess,” I said, trying to smile. 

They came closer. I caught the harsh look Jess shot at Sherlock before turning back to me with pity. Hannah reached out her arms as she walked closer. She looked scared, as if she was afraid I’d push her away after what happened the other night. It made my stomach churn, to see her looking at me like a nervous little pup, afraid of seeing a bear for the first time.

“We were so, so sorry to hear about what happened,” she said. Her voice was drooping. “We’ve all been so worried – all of us in the camp. Oh, John.”

Before I could say anything her arms were wrapped snugly around me. I stumbled back a step, still frozen, before I awkwardly placed a hand on her arm.

“I’m so sorry,” she said into my neck. I could feel the way my beard was scratching against her soft skin, and smell the puff of fruity soap that was nestled in her hair.

I tried to make myself relax and patted her arm again. “It’s alright,” I said. My voice sounded too flat. I started to slowly pull back, enough that she felt it and finally pulled away. She stood close, not even glancing at Sherlock, and looked at me with large eyes. 

“Are you alright?” she asked. Her voice was thin.

I took a half step back and scratched at my jaw. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m doing alright,” I said. I added a bit too late, “Thank you.”

She smiled at me with sad eyes and bit her lip. “If there’s anything we can –”

“Yes, yes, he’ll alert you immediately if you can be of assistance. Your physical display of affection has already gone a long way in lifting his spirits. Now if you’ll excuse us.”

Sherlock wrapped his hand firmly around my shoulder and started walking as he spoke, leading us away and down to the truck with long steps. I paused and turned back to Hannah and Jess standing confused in the trees, internally chuckling at the glare Jess was shooting at the back of Sherlock’s head as he strode on ahead of me.

“Sorry about that,” I said, nodding back over my shoulder. “He’s just excited to go see a kill site.”

Jess crossed her arms over her chest and stepped closer to Hannah. “Apparently.”

My spine sagged watching Hannah stand there looking all alone in the gravel. I took a step back towards them and reached out a hand for her arm. “Thank you,” I said softly. “I do appreciate it.”

She smiled at me, and started moving in for another hug before I stepped away. “Have a good day off, girls,” I said over my shoulder. I jogged down the rest of the sloping path towards the lot, awkwardly waving once at Nick and Chris who were standing in the doorway of one of the offices, looking at me like I was a ghost walking through the center of camp.

By the time I flung open the truck door and sank into the seat, I felt that I’d just run through a whole enemy army and come out alive, then hated myself for feeling that way after something as simple as receiving kind words from coworkers.

Sherlock huffed his silent irritation at me taking so long and looked out the window, tapping his foot to get going. The sight of it made me smile in a way I rarely did anymore those days.

“Unit 4?” I asked to confirm as we pulled out towards the Road. He hummed his yes. 

Ten minutes in, I started to settle in to the comforting rhythm of the drive – the familiar hugging curves of the Road, and the weight of both our bodies in the truck, and the smell of him carried on the breeze through both our windows rolled down. The way that same wind rustled through the soft curls of his hair. Then he spoke for the first time, looking straight ahead at the Road.

“So, getting popular with the young ladies now, are we?”

I muttered under my breath and shook my head. “She was just being nice.”

Sherlock hummed. “Yes, I would definitely characterize that full body hug, with her head on your shoulder, as ‘nice’.”

I smirked and dropped one of my hands out the window to feel the steady breeze. “I’m not rising to your bait,” I said calmly.

Sherlock went on as if I hadn’t even spoken. “And in any case, that poor young woman has just demonstrated an appalling sense of taste.”

“Oh, yeah?” I said, fighting the smile on my lips. “What – because I’m too much of a loner? Because I’m way too old for her?”

Sherlock tilted his head and held his palms together below his mouth. “Well, those are both obviously true. I could spend this entire drive giving you a whole list of reasons why you’d be a horrible fit in personality for most people on this planet.”

“Oh gee, thanks –”

“But what I was specifically referring to is the fact that your young Hannah has chosen to place her affections on the one Ranger in this entire Park who is almost _religiously_ homosexual.”

I barked out a laugh as the fresh wind blew the hair back from my face. “Oh, and you’re excluding yourself from that poll?”

He turned to me and smirked. “Obviously. I’m not a Ranger this year, am I? Just a common man.”

“Right,” I said, smiling back. “A common man who by all accounts is even gayer than I am.”

He settled back into his seat, folding his feet up onto the dashboard. The wind whistled through his curls. “Well, if a Ranger says that, it must be true,” he said slowly, seriously, as if he was pondering a great new truth of the age. He gave me one more soft look with a hint of smile on his lips before closing his eyes against the sunny breeze.

After another half-hour of driving the truck had grown hot from the bright sun. Sherlock leaned forward to pull off his jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt on his forearms. I stared out of the corner of my eye at the stretches of smooth skin – less tan this season since Sherlock had spent more time indoors with Greg and the team.

A sudden thought struck me – something I desperately needed to know. Out of nowhere, all I could hear over the sound of the truck tires on the dirt road was the sound of the little bag crinkling as I emptied the white powder down into the sink. I thought of the look in his eyes that night at my kitchen table as he pushed them towards me, filled with shame, and not even able to meet my gaze.

Something blared in my mind for me to keep silent – that I shouldn’t speak about those things, or remind him of them. That I shouldn’t act like we were on a level of intimacy where we could talk about drugs while driving in a car.

But then something else flashed through my mind – the feeling of his lips pressed to my forehead in the middle of the night, cutting through the sobs in my chest and reminding me I wasn’t alone in the dark – reminding me that I hadn’t died, too, back on the floor of the kennel office. And I knew, just like the first day I realized my name was John Watson, that these words had to be said out loud. That they couldn’t stay silent. 

I looked over at him, waiting until he met my gaze before I glanced down at his arm. “Are you alright?” I asked softly.

He knew immediately what I meant. I waited for him to be angry, but instead he reached over and calmly started rolling up the sleeve even more.

I shot out my hand to stop him, resting it on top of his shirt covering the inside of his elbow. “You don’t need to show me anything,” I said. “Just, are you alright?”

His arm slowly relaxed beneath my hand. We drove around a handful of hairpin turns before he finally answered. 

“I’m alright, John,” he said, voice soft. Then he reached over and placed his hand on top of mine, pressing my fingers down gently into the crook of his arm. “I’m alright,” he said again.

He kept his hand there for a long time. Long enough that I could feel the pulse of his heart through his fingers, and that the place between us grew warm and damp from the heat of our skin.

I knew that ‘coworkers’ didn’t do that – didn’t hold each other’s hands on the most vulnerable, secret parts of each other’s bodies. That coworkers didn’t know the sounds the other one made in the moment they had an orgasm, or know intimately the taste of each other’s tongues at two in the morning. Coworkers didn’t joke in a car about being gay, or hold each other as they wept in the middle of the night, or fling open a truck door and demand to go along with the other person who’s about to watch their beloved dog die.

Coworkers didn’t know the reason why I never took the annual Polar Bear Plunge with all the staff at the lone pool in McKinley Park.

His hand didn’t shake or try to pull away. It rested on me, a steady weight, for miles and miles, until he slowly trailed his fingers off the back of my own only when I had to downshift to wait for a passing bus.

“Here,” Sherlock said a few miles later without any warning. I huffed as I slammed on the brakes and pulled over to a convenient look-out point. 

“You ever gonna learn to give me a bit of head’s up before we stop?” I asked as I put the truck in park.

Sherlock shrugged and jumped down from the truck. “Complete waste of words,” he said. “You always stop where I need you to regardless.”

I yanked my pack from the back of the truck and started following him blindly off into the tundra, not even realizing until we were a ways out from the Road that our footsteps were perfectly in sync. Without looking back he silently held out his hand just behind him, flexing his fingers until I placed his extra bear spray and compass in his palm.

“I’m about to run off,” he said. He shoved the spray and compass down in his pocket.

I wiped my hand over my mouth to hide my stupid grin. “Right,” I said back. I nodded out at the vast horizon. “Just give me the whistle.”

I couldn’t believe it had been a whole year since I’d said those words. They felt so comfortable on my tongue – familiar and clear as if I’d just spoken them the day before. As if the last week had been spent following Sherlock through the boundless, clear hills, and not lying alone in my room missing everything in the entire world with a deep, sharp ache, and yet also not even wanting to sit up from my own couch.

I realized belatedly that Sherlock had stopped walking. He was looking at me from a few feet away, soft hands in his pockets and the breeze blowing through his hair. I suddenly knew he understood every thought I was having – that I was a sleeping man walking, and that I had also never been more alive. 

And I understood that he was feeling all those same things, too. That he also felt that he had just said, “ _I’m about to run off,_ ” only the day before.

We smiled at each other. I felt it crinkling in the corners of my eyes. I tilted my head towards the horizon. “Go on, then,” I said. “Find your animal carcass or your pile of scat or whatever. I’ll find you.”

He waited another moment, and the air between us thrummed. I could smell him on the breeze - could almost physically feel the perfect, clear outline of the mountains at his back.

“I know you will, John,” he said softly, then he turned towards the horizon and sniffed the breeze for a moment before taking north-east at a jog, curls flying wild in the wind and his legs tearing through the thick brush.

I watched him go until his head disappeared over a rocky hill. From far off I heard his bear call, “ _You’d be an absolute idiot to try and come after me!_ ” and the sound of it tingled in the blood in my veins. I followed slowly in his direction after another moment, placing my feet in his fresh footprints in the soft moss. 

As I hiked, I thought about the last time we had been together in that Unit, back when the reason my limbs were sore and aching had been because of the quick, pounding sex we’d had in my bed that morning. 

We’d been walking along, side by side, with our pants getting torn and muddied by the thick brush. And Sherlock had turned to me when we finally made it up the steep drainage slope to a flat hill. He’d been panting and a bit breathless, with a flush over his warm cheeks. It had taken my breath away. And he’d laughed at the loose leaves and twigs clinging to my hair, and joked, “ _Oh, my Ranger,_ ” before he reached up to pluck them away.

My insides had frozen.

Suddenly I hadn’t been standing in the middle of Denali with Sherlock’s fingers in my hair. I’d been back in a barn, with dust in my eyes, and there were short, gruff fingers picking hay out of the knots in my hair with rough tugs. And a voice was saying, “ _Jeez, Ranger, what the hell got into you? Did it really hurt that bad? Did you not think I was any good?_ ”

Sherlock had noticed my body go still, and quickly pulled his hand away. “ _John_?” he’d asked, looking worried, and slightly afraid.

And I’d wanted, oh, I’d wanted, to tell him so much in that moment. 

I’d wanted to tell him that his careful eyes on my face were the only points of light reminding me that I wasn’t back in that barn – like glittering stars shining through the wooden slats in the roof – or breaking through the thick clouds above the few alleyways where, over the years, I’d wrapped my hand around another man’s cock shoved deep in his pants. How his hands on my body were the only hands which had ever felt my full skin, and the only fingers on earth which I would want to pluck the leaves and straw once again from my hair.

I’d wanted to ask him if he understood how I wanted to pull away from him less and less – how every time he touched me it erased another pair of hands which had touched me _before_.

But I hadn’t told him any of that, not that day, standing there in the beautiful, full sun with the rays lighting up the faint freckles on his face. I hadn’t wanted to ruin the fragile moment – as if my memories were heavy, mud-covered rocks which would rip through the thin silk of his eyes in the soft breeze. 

Instead I’d nodded out at the horizon line behind him and said, “ _Sorry, thought I saw something._ ” As I’d leaned up to kiss him I was sure he could taste the lie in my mouth, but he hadn’t asked me for the truth, and I hadn’t offered to tell him.

I realized, following a year later with my feet pressing into his footprints, that I should have told him everything – that day, and the day he shaved me, and the night we rested in that tent on top of the Muldrow in the high, punishing winds. 

I should have told him everything Lugnut knew and more, and the fresh regret ached the way the stitches had in my chest all those decades ago – sharp and debilitating like little knives piercing my lungs.

I heard his whistle, then, cutting through the clear sky like a hawk slicing a path through the clouds. I picked up my pace to follow it, and came up over a cresting hill to find Sherlock waiting for me at the edge of a small pool. The mosquitos swarmed around his curls in the unmoving sun, and the mossy fingers of the tundra dipped down gently into the cool water like lips cupping around a crisp, clear drink, lazily sucking it down while the wildflowers bent under the weight of the sun’s rays. 

It was like stepping into a photograph from the summer before, where Sherlock was smiling at me with warm eyes, and Denali’s mighty peaks echoed our small voices, and I still had the taste of his semen in my mouth from the night before. I half expected, walking up to join him by the water’s edge, that he would step forward, and take my face in his hands, and kiss me beneath the clouds.

He didn’t. He waited until I had reached his side before thrusting his hand into my pack for the canteen of water, not bothering to stop the thick droplets that spilled down his chin and throat. He wiped his forearm over his mouth when he was done, and his lips glistened.

“You’re out of shape,” he said calmly, hands on his hips as he surveyed the edges of the pool.

For some reason, his words soothed a bit of the regret still ripping through my lungs. The teasing felt comfortable – something I could rely on and know. It wasn’t the breathless tension of walking towards him and wondering whether I would throw caution to the wind and pull him back into my arms.

I dropped my pack onto the ground and massaged the back of my neck with my hands. “Oh, yeah? And you know this how?”

He didn’t hesitate. “A year ago it would have taken you approximately twelve minutes to hike that distance between us, even accounting for your obsessive need to pause and survey the horizon line every two minutes, as if this place is teeming with millions of bears instead of just hundreds. It just took you fourteen and a half minutes, your breathing is elevated, you’re perspiring under your arms even though the weather is only eighteen degrees –”

“Oh, is it, now? It’s snowing?”

“ _Fine_ , sixty-five degrees _Fahrenheit_ , since you can’t even do a simple conversion, and, furthermore, if you’d let me finish, I estimate you’ve lost approximately six pounds in muscle mass over the last month and a half, primarily due to stress and a complete lack of leaving your cabin outside of patrols, contrary to the start of the season when you were at the fittest you’d been in years since you were obsessively hiking at all hours of the day so as not to accidentally run into me back in Toklat and have to have an awkward conversation. Honestly, John, do you think I’m an idiot? That rock over there on the ground could probably come up with five more reasons as to why you’re out of shape, and you need me to spell it all out for you like it’s all some great surprise.”

I couldn’t respond, I was laughing too hard. I took a moment to try and wipe my eyes, catching my breath while he waited beside me with his hands on his hips. 

I looked at him, and broke out into a fresh laugh all over again. “How many minutes during this hike did you spend planning that speech?” I finally got out.

My heart burst when his mouth quirked up into a smile. “Only six or seven,” he said, grinning, and before I realized what I was doing, I reached out to place my hand on his upper arm, rubbing along his flannel shirt. “You’re insane,” I said softly, still holding in a laugh.

His eyes sparkled as they gazed down at me, illuminated like crystals of ice in the sun. 

“I know,” he said. He didn’t let me look away. “You’ve told me that many times before, Ranger.”

-

The rest of the day passed inside a strange, muffled dream. 

I walked in Sherlock’s footsteps, but my feet never really touched the ground. His voice spoke to me, and yet he always sounded far away, as if his words were traveling from Denali’s peak down into the wildflowers – bursting across the surface of the pools or rustling through the distant trees. We stayed at the site for another hour or so, and I sat back, without even really feeling the moss beneath my palms, and watched Sherlock look and touch and taste everything in sight, feeling like every second that passed was one stolen from a year before.

We walked back to the Road side by side. He made me laugh, again, with an overly-ridiculous bear call. And back in my truck, with his feet propped up on the dashboard, he fiddled around in the glovebox with his long, steady fingers until he came across an old tape – not my favorite bluegrass, but one he knew I enjoyed. He popped it in without even looking, and the mandolin flooded the air in the truck.

I was glad he hadn’t picked my favorite – the Jimmy Martin tape that we used to listen to with his hand resting on my thigh. It would have reminded me we weren’t going to kiss when we got out of the truck.

He washed the truck by my side back in the Toklat lot, glaring at the two other Rangers who started to make their way towards me with pitying looks in their eyes. I kept my back turned as if I didn’t even notice. 

A twisted part of me never wanted to hear anyone else’s voice ever again – that I could even take the “I’m sorry’s,” or the “Oh, John’s,” or the pity, but only if they came from Sherlock’s own lips. 

I looked at him for a long moment across the bed of the washed truck before we parted. He looked right back. My hands and forearms were still dripping with water, and the evening air was starting to grow crisp and cool, carrying a breeze from the high-altitude snow still clinging to Denali’s slopes. 

Looking at him, I felt that I was balancing on the smallest rock in the middle of a rushing river – that one single word could tilt me forward into his warm arms, or back on my ass to be drowned in the icy current. The fear sparked in my chest, and it mixed with a longing so sudden and sharp, I thought that maybe I would plead with Sherlock out loud just to make it go away.

I stood there, and I balanced, and I didn’t know which words to say to push me into his arms, so I only nodded, and said, “Sherlock,” too low under my breath for him to really hear.

Something flashed quickly through his eyes – the same look I’d seen when he’d tried to reach across my kitchen table to hold my hand, right before I’d pulled away.

“John,” he said back.

I could see him starting to close off. Something desperate flared up in my mind, tingling in my frozen fingers.

“My shifts start again in two days,” I said quickly – voice a bit too rushed and high. “I’ll be driving through Polychrome.”

He swallowed hard. I could see the cold wind racing shivers across his exposed skin. “I believe Griffin has some collar data to collaborate in Polychrome,” he said simply.

I nearly fell to my knees. I tore my hand away from where it had been gripping the metal bed of the truck and took a step back up towards the cabins. “Right,” I said. I couldn’t quite meet his gaze. “Maybe I’ll ask him.”

Something sagged in the line of his shoulders. He put his hands in his pockets as the wind blew a curl into his eyes – eyes which looked full and deep enough to hold every drop of water from the mighty Toklat.

“Okay,” he said back, only after I’d already turned around to leave. I knew he watched me the whole way back up to my cabin door.

 

\--

 

I coughed with my hand over my mouth, trying not to choke on the piece of pepper.

“Shit, Molly,” I said in a broken voice. “You put eighteen jalapenos into this chili?”

She blushed across from me at her kitchen table and rested her chin on her drawn up knee. “Ah, sorry about that,” she said. She handed me a glass of water when I still kept coughing, and I took it with a grateful nod.

“Greg likes it this way,” she went on, holding back a laugh. “I guess I’ve gotten used to it.”

I wiped my forearm over the thin sheen of sweat that had broken out on my brow. “Pretty sure that could kill half the Rangers who work in this Park,” I said. “Even some of my old coworkers from back in the Southwest – and those guys used to dare each other to eat raw peppers for fun.”

She laughed and started to rise up from the table. “Don’t be such a baby,” she scolded. “But I’m pretty sure I have some of last batch still frozen, if you want –”

I held up a hand. “’S fine, now that I know to expect fire. It’s still delicious.”

She grinned, a bit proud of herself, and leaned back in her old wooden chair. She rubbed a hand over the small curve of her new belly, barely visible underneath one of Greg’s oversized knit sweaters. 

I glanced down at her stomach and said my usual line. “Everything all right in there?”

She rolled her eyes and rested her head against the back of her chair. “Yes – it hasn’t burned the house down yet,” she smirked. 

I took another careful bite of chili, enjoying the burn of heat down my throat to ward off the cold night. “And you’ve thought of a name?”

She groaned. “God, no. What a nightmare – the lists and the books – everyone telling you their perfect suggestion –“

“Well, I could solve all of that for you,” I cut in.

She shot me a look. “Oh, let me guess. Name it after you? You and billions of other John’s?” She smiled at me warmly and jammed her toe against my shin under the table. “Honestly, it’s like your parents _wanted_ to get you mixed up with half the other men alive.”

I smiled immediately, ignoring the familiar burst of shame that always burned in the back of my throat whenever anyone made that joke – shame at my teenage self who’d whispered “John” and thought it was perfect. Molly didn’t even notice my small pause.

“Obviously not John,” I said, feigning serious. “You don’t know if it’s a boy or girl yet, right?”

She shook her head. “We’re waiting till it’s born.”

I nodded. “Right, then. You gotta pick a name you both agree on that could go either way. Simplify the process so you don’t have to decide on two different names.”

She sat up, suddenly interested, “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” I said. I took another bite of chili to make her wait. “Gotta name the kid after someone who really means something – a name they’ll be proud to have, no matter who they are.”

“Like . . .?”

“Well, you know, something really meaningful and classic. Like Lugnut.”

It was the first time either of us had said the name all evening, and to my relief, Molly didn’t hesitate, but threw back her head and laughed. “Fuck you,” she finally said. “I thought you were actually being serious!”

I didn’t break into a smile. “Lugnut Lestrade,” I said, voice steady. “Got a nice ring to it.”

I ducked the cloth napkin Molly threw at my face. I grinned and winked at her when she finally looked up at me, eyes shining as she tucked her hair behind her ear. 

“Well then, Mister Names Expert,” she said, taking a long sip of mint tea. “If you could go back a whole century to when you were born and have a do-over, what would you choose?”

My chest clenched, but I knew my face hadn’t shown it. It was one of those impossible things about Molly Hooper – one of the things that drew me to her like a firefly to the light – how none of her words, no matter what she said, ever filled me with fear. 

I paused, acting like I was thinking. The back of my mind repeated the answer “ _I’d choose John_ ” on a loop in my head. 

“Don’t know about that,” I finally said. I scratched at my beard. “My dad’s name was Theodore – went by Teddy. Grandpa’s name was Theodore, too. Guess I wouldn’t have minded being another one if they hadn’t went with John.”

Molly’s eyes brightened. She sat up straighter in her seat. “And he . . . you were close with him? Your dad?” she asked. Her voice was focused, quietly thrumming with curiosity. In the six years of our friendship I’d never even said the words mom or dad. 

I stared down at my hands tracing one of the grains in the wooden table. 

I thought of the shotgun in his hand as I sprinted away. I also thought of him sanding the wood for my bed in the stuffy attic.

“Yes,” I finally said. I looked up from my hands. “I was, in a way.”

She looked at me for a long moment, then gazed over my shoulder, staring into space. “Theodore,” she said softly. A grin lit up her lips. “Theo for short.” She played with a long lock of her hair with her fingers. “Greg would like that.”

She smiled then, resting her head sideways in her palm. “Sort of throws your strategy out the window, though,” she said. “Won’t work at all if it’s a girl.”

I smiled back at her, even as a long-forgotten ache suddenly panged in my chest. I was grateful that the dim firelight hid the embarrassing water that was suddenly pooling in my eyes. 

“Yeah, it doesn’t really work for a girl,” I agreed. 

Later that night, as I nursed a beer and Molly eyed it longingly from the other end of the couch, she curled her knees up to her chest and played with the loose strands on her wool socks. “Greg’s been talking about London,” she said out of the comfortable silence. 

I raised my eyebrows. “For the winters?”

She shook her head down at her feet. “Forever.”

My palms started to sweat. I turned so I was facing her on the couch, setting my beer down onto the wooden floor. The sound of the glass hitting the wood was impossibly loud. 

“And what do you say?” I said. “If he’s talking about London, what are you talking about?”

She looked at me quickly, something like gratefulness in her eyes. The tense line of her spine softened. “That’s the problem, I guess. Everything he says makes sense. More resources, better schools for the kid, his whole career is centered there – all of his research with the university. Could afford a nice little house. No harsh weather. No dangerous bears. All the access of a big city.”

She sounded like she was reading each thing off a flat, prepared list. The silence in the cabin roared.

“But it isn’t Denali,” I said softly.

She looked at me with wet eyes before smiling at herself and shaking her head. “It isn’t Denali.”

“Does he know it isn’t Denali?” I asked, knowing she would understand what I meant. 

“We haven’t really talked about it,” she said. “He just . . . every time we talk about the kid, it’s in the context of London, you know? It took me weeks to realize he was even doing it. I was nodding along until he mentioned how it would be nice to take a vacation back here when the kid’s older – show them where ‘mum and dad first met’ and all that. And then I realized . . .”

She stopped and sighed, and went back to picking at her socks. The crackling fire filled the silence, lulling like a dream.

“Sherlock wanted me to move to London with him,” I suddenly said.

I froze, stunned at my own words. I’d meant to keep talking about Molly – to console her, or try and give advice, or say literally anything other than part of what happened last year at the end of August.

“I’m sorry,” I said immediately. “God, sorry, I didn’t mean to say that, this isn’t about –”

“He asked you to do that?”

I realized Molly had turned her entire body towards me. The sadness in her eyes was gone – talking about leaving Denali with Greg – and in its place was a fierce focus directed solely on me.

She looked less sad, and it felt good.

I took a deep breath and rubbed a hand over my face. “Well, no, he didn’t,” I said. “He didn’t really ask. He just . . . decided.”

Molly hummed. “That’s why . . .”

I kept my eyes closed. “Yeah, that’s why.” I took another deep breath. “Well, part of why.”

“You loved him,” she said, her voice not a question.

Suddenly her voice was the only thing tethering me to the world – the only thin little rope keeping me bound to her couch instead of flying back to the side of that horrible mountain, where I’d stood with a cold sweat dripping down my spine.

The mountain where Sherlock had said, “ _You’re being irrational, John. You don’t need to live here out in the middle of nowhere anymore. That isn’t who you really are. You’re_ better _than this._ ”

And I had said, “ _How the fuck do you know who I really am? That this isn’t me?_ ”

And he’d spat back, “ _Because you’ve just been hiding away from the real world out here! Keeping yourself hidden away so you won’t have to get close to another human being!_ ”

And I had shoved my finger in his chest, and wildly grunted out, “ _You of all fucking people, Sherlock Holmes, do not get to make me feel ashamed. Not you. Not you of all people. I will not be fucking ashamed of who I am, of how --_ ”

And he’d cut in, wide-eyed and exasperated, “ _Of course this isn’t about being ashamed, this is about finally_ living _. Being a part of the real world!_ ”

And then, later, “ _What, so you just looked around and picked the most broken Ranger you could find_?”

And, “ _Yes! Are you honestly saying you would have been happier if I’d left you alone?_ ”

I swallowed hard and opened my eyes to the ceiling of Molly’s cabin, fluttering in the firelight like a rolling, gold sea.

I took a deep breath. “Yes,” I answered. I nodded once up at the wood beams. “I did. But I never . . . I never told him.”

“If he asked you now, would you go?”

I blinked and looked over at Molly, soft and beautiful and curled up in the warm light. Her eyes looked deep and black, like the tip of Lugnut’s little nose. 

“He wouldn’t ask me now,” I said, hating how harsh and sad my voice sounded. How hopeless.

“But if he did,” she said, not deterred. “If he asked you now, would you go?”

And I suddenly thought, in that moment, of what had happened earlier on that same day in late August. 

The moment had always been eclipsed in my memory by our fight just a few hours later. But now, sitting quietly on Molly’s soft couch, I remembered waking up too-warm in the sleeping bag with Sherlock curled up in my arms. My thighs had still been sore from fucking him the night before – when he had sunk down on top of me with his curls brushing the top of the tent, and I’d entered him with the erect cock I was wearing instead of just my fingers, since the lunatic had thought to shove that secretly into his bag for our backpacking trip instead of saving room for extra supplies.

I’d woken with him in my arms, and stretched my cramped legs in the warm sleeping bag, and I’d reached down with one hand into the pocket of my jeans and wrapped my fingers around the little key there, warm from the heat of my thigh. And I’d thought through all the things I could possibly say before handing him the piece of metal in my palm. How I would tell him that he was better than the darkness in my little attic, and more beautiful than Denali’s clear peak in the melting sun. How I wanted him to stay, stay in my life, and keep sleeping between my sheets, and make my cabin in Talkeetna smell of only peppercorn and cedar. And sex. 

How I wanted him to be with me. And I with him.

And I remembered, sitting there with Molly’s quiet, even breaths by my side, how Sherlock had woken up and stroked his warm palm up my side underneath my layers, and how he had pulled me on top of him, and groaned, and kissed me until I couldn’t breathe.

How I’d left the key in my pocket, thinking, _Later. I’ll do it later._

I wanted to turn to Molly and ask her if she thought everything would have been different if I’d pulled back from our feverish kiss in the tent, and reached down into my pocket, and pressed the key to his lips and said, “ _Wait, here. Yes. Please._ ”

“I love Denali,” I said instead, staring straight ahead at the wooden walls. “It’s . . . it’s the only place I’ve ever had in my entire life that’s really been home.” I glanced at Molly. “You get that.”

She nodded seriously. “I do.”

I kept looking at her, tracing the sweet lines of her soft eyebrows – the strong curve of her neck. I didn’t know if she knew it, but the sight of her face was an integral part of my Denali, too. That the thought of her going off to London felt like being told I’d have to cut off a limb.

I leaned back into the couch and took a few long, quiet breaths. “But if he asked me. . .” 

I paused, fighting down the embarrassment that I felt like a confused teenager – some lovelorn, naïve kid instead of a grown man. And then the words poured from my lips before I could stop to reconsider any of them, or even doubt how pathetic they sounded.

“God, if he asked me now,” I went on in a rush. “If he just strode in and said ‘pack your bags, Ranger, we’re going to London,’ I’d be on the first fucking plane. I wouldn’t . . . Shit, you know, he was _it_. I never told him that, but he was.” 

My voice was getting choked, and I stopped to swallow hard before I could go on. “He was it, kid, and I . . . I just threw it all away. So yeah – I would follow him. You know what, I’m forty-two years old. Too fucking old to make the same mistake twice. I would follow him anywhere.” I shrugged my shoulders, which felt weighted down with lead, and shook my head helplessly at the wall. “He won’t ask again, but I would. And I . . . Molly, I don’t want to be alone. I have you, I know. But he . . . Fuck, I’ve been alone.”

Molly was silent for a long time. We both sat on the couch, staring out at the walls – looking at old wood, but instead seeing London in our minds – the skyscrapers blocking out Denali’s highest ridges, and the Thames winding through apartment blocks instead of the Toklat among cabins. 

Finally, just as the fire started to die down, Molly spoke. “I don’t think you threw it all away,” she said softly.

I gave a harsh laugh. “You weren’t there,” I said dully. My voice sounded exhausted. “You don’t know what I said to him. What _he_ said.”

“I know he came with you last week,” Molly cut in urgently. “Anybody could see he just threw on the clothes closest to him when he saw you were leaving. He sees you. He somehow knew why you were getting in your truck to drive out here.”

I heard her, but I couldn’t answer yet. The silence of Molly’s cabin after her words roared in my ears. The crackle of the wood burning low in the fireplace sounded like fireworks bursting across a dark, foggy sky.

I nodded, staring down at my hands – hands which I’d never been able to stop thinking looked too small. “He slept with me that night,” I said. When Molly sucked in a breath, I quickly added, “Just slept. Next to me in my bed. I asked him to. He –”

I stopped myself just in time from saying, “ _He remembered to give me my shot. He remembered the dosage – where I keep the pouch._ ”

She didn’t ask what I was about to say. She nodded slowly, idly making a small braid in her long hair. “I don’t think you threw it all away,” she said again.

My throat suddenly ached. I blinked hard and shifted up against the couch. I wanted so desperately to agree with her. I wanted to go see Lugnut, and put him in my truck, and take Sherlock far away from here, back to that clearing on the way to Talkeetna where the three of us napped in the warm grass. I wanted to press the little brass key into his palm, kiss his fingertips and tell him the truth behind how I got that cigarette burn in the middle of my hand – how my mom had caught me when I was twelve trying to pee standing up hidden behind our trailer in the dusty yard. 

“Sorry,” I said, rubbing my hands once roughly over my face. “This was supposed to be about you, kid – you and Greg and London.”

Molly gave me a small grin. “If my biggest problem in life is deciding whether or not to live with my family in a beautiful park, or a beautiful city, I’d say we don’t really need to be talking about me at all,” she said. 

“That _is_ worth talking about,” I told her. I reached out to smooth down her hair. “You’re always worth talking about.”

Her eyes twinkled in the firelight. “Well everybody knows _that_ ,” she said, chuckling. “But what you apparently don’t know is that it’s painfully obvious that Sherlock Holmes misses you like crazy.”

When I tried to groan or interrupt her, she held on to my arm. “Seriously, John. You don’t see him when you’re not around. You’re all he talks about, ‘John says this,’ or ‘John thinks that,’ – either that or he’s staring out the window looking like a lost dog.”

I took a long breath and forced myself to meet her gaze. I could see that look on Sherlock’s face in my mind as if he was standing right in front of me in her cabin. 

“Honestly, I feel like I look the same way,” I finally said. 

She nodded once. “You do. You both look like the most goddamn depressing things I’ve ever seen.” She reached out with warm eyes and put her hand on my shoulder. “That’s how I know you didn’t throw anything away at all, you moron.”

And all of a sudden, her simple words broke me from my fog. I laughed, chest feeling open and light, and shifted closer to her on the small couch.

And something else happened – something more than the lines of regret softening on my face. 

For the first time in weeks – in months – since Sherlock walked up behind me on the river rock, I finally allowed that tiny little flame of hope behind my lungs to keep burning, letting it grow without trying to snuff it out. 

The flame felt warm – warm and alive. 

When I looked back over at Molly, the air in the room felt fresh and clear. I knew she could see everything in my face – that I didn’t need to say anything more about Sherlock Holmes.

“So,” I said instead, pausing and clearing my throat. “Lugnut Lestrade?”

Molly raised her eyebrows. “What makes you think it won’t be Lugnut Hooper? You may be ancient but I never took you to be that old fashioned, John Watson.”

I laughed and put my arm around her as she stroked her fingers across her stomach. “Not gonna let Greg make you Ranger Lestrade, then?” I said into her hair.

“Hell no,” she agreed. “I’d have to change the nametags on all my uniforms – fill out all this damn paperwork. Nothing could be worth that.”

I smiled and shook my head as she leaned against me. Both of us were fully aware that it was the most physically affectionate we’d ever been, and I had a feeling that both of us were equally as aware that sitting together like that felt as necessary as breathing. 

I held her, and I only felt the flame in my chest, soothing over the ache.

A few quiet minutes later, I started to doze off on the couch. The last thing I heard before my eyes drooped shut was Molly’s voice, whispered down at her small belly beneath Greg’s old sweater. 

“Theo,” I heard her whisper, and then I drifted off to sleep.

 

\--

 

The next morning, right before I left for my early shift, I slid open the drawer of my little bedside table and looked down at it in the silent, dim light.

The sock was in there, limp and hidden in the shadowy corner. I gripped myself to adjust the cock Sherlock had given me inside my uniform pants, taking an extra second to stroke my fingers slowly along the length.

A memory, hazy and drifting apart at the edges, passed through my mind like a drifting fog – when I’d been driving last year, and Sherlock had slipped his fingers between my legs. When he’d flicked open my belt and zipper, while I told him he was insane, and he palmed me through my boxers, right in the middle of the goddamn Park Road, breathing hard while he stroked me until I started to buck up into his palm.

When I’d pulled over when there weren’t any busses in sight and actually _come_ , watching Sherlock’s long fingers stroke and pump the cock beneath my boxers and imagining I was growing harder, filling out long and thick into his hand.

I wasn’t looking for the sock in my bedside table drawer, though. I moved it aside and kneeled down onto the cold wood floor to get a better look. Even in the dim light, my eyes quickly found the glint of brass tucked away in the back of the drawer. 

I looked at it, but I didn’t touch it. 

A part of me was shocked to see it was even still there – as if it could have up and walked away over the past year, sometime between now and when I’d first thrown it into the drawer after leaving Sherlock out in the tundra, with curses under my breath and what felt like fire and ice in my veins. With a tear sliding down my cheek that got lost in my beard. 

Molly’s words echoed in my mind. “ _You didn’t throw anything away,_ ” and I felt that the flame behind my lungs was still there, growing even brighter after my long, sleepless night.

It felt good, and I suddenly realized that I didn’t want the flame to leave. I wanted it to burn me, slowly. Not quick and bright and hot like it had last year – all consuming and blinding and shutting out everything but the fierce light.

I wanted it to be crackling – the long, steady flame of a fire keeping warm through the impenetrable night. I wanted it to slowly warm my bones from inside them, hunkering down against my muscle, instead of burning my hands.

I wanted to be warm.

I looked at the key for another moment before pushing the drawer closed. My knees cracked loudly when I stood. 

I didn’t stop to think about how everything was suddenly different. 

Without hesitating, I threw on my Ranger hat and grabbed my bag, then headed out across the sunlit gravel towards my truck to start my patrol. I didn’t think about anything the whole day out in the Park. As I drove, and surveyed the horizon lines I’d long since memorized like the skin of my own hand, and responded to a few radio calls to bring in backpackers whose tents could be seen from the Road. 

And when I came back and washed my truck after the long day, back and neck aching with sunburn on my cheeks, I dumped my bag and my gun in my cabin, then walked straight up to Sherlock’s porch. 

His door swung open before I could even knock.

Sherlock stood there looking at me with wide eyes. My raised hand fell awkwardly back to my side. I hadn’t seen him in nearly five days, not since I took him out to Unit 4 at the end of my week off. We’d barely even seen each other around camp, or along the Road.

The flame spread through my chest the way the melting snow seeps gracefully off Denali’s sides, warmed by the gentle sun and rushing down to sink softly into the moss.

“Come with me,” I said to him.

Sherlock nodded. 

He grabbed his jacket from where it hung next to the door and stepped out to follow me immediately without saying a word. I didn’t tell him what we were doing or where we were going as we hopped up in unison back into the truck. I was still in my full uniform, and my stomach was aching for a warm, late lunch, and yet that flame kept growing, sighing beneath my ribs as I put the truck in gear and pulled back out towards the Road. 

Sherlock folded his feet up onto the dashboard and rolled down the window a few inches until the wind blew through his hair. My eyes kept glancing to him on my right, where he stared out at the endless green with soft, calm eyes. Our thighs were achingly close on the bench seat, closer than they’d been for any moment that whole season. I could almost feel the heat from his skin seeping through the fabric of his jeans – the pulsing, fluttering beat of his heart that matched the warmth beneath my own skin.

“We’re going to Wonder Lake,” he eventually said, just after we passed the busses of people still unloading at Eielson for the afternoon Ranger hikes.

I smirked. “Don’t expect me to be that impressed,” I said back. “Not like you have that many places to pick from when I didn’t tell you to bring your hiking boots.”

He quietly laughed next to me, and the sound of it stole the breath from my lungs. “Got a point there, Ranger,” he said. “You may have grown mildly more intelligent over the last year.”

I could feel myself smiling. “Yeah, well, gotta give the Park some reason to keep me around,” I said.

He looked at me, then, with his deep grey eyes. My cheeks burned as he studied my face – the extra lines and wrinkles that hadn’t been there the year before. His body shifted on the seat, barely half an inch closer to my own, but we still didn’t touch.

“We always meant to take that canoe out onto the lake last year, but never found the time,” he said softly.

I kept my eyes on the twists of the Road. “What do you think we’re doing right now?”

He just hummed, and he didn’t say anything more the whole rest of the drive out to Wonder – just made a little noise of acknowledgement half an hour later when we rounded a curve and discovered a gigantic moose ambling leisurely by the side of the Road.

We parked near the Wonder Lake campsites tucked into the twisting trees and made the short hike over to the hidden dock to untie the canoe. I’d only ever taken the staff canoe out once before – way back in my second season just so the other Rangers would stop pressuring me to go. 

There was something about Wonder that always made me uneasy – like it was too fragile to be out in, or that being out on the crystal still water left you too exposed beneath the watching sky. As if the lake would crumple into thin glass shards and swallow you up whole if you dared step out upon the water and cause a ripple. 

Sherlock held the canoe steady as I stepped into the front. It was evening, but the sun was still hanging full and clear in the sky, painting the water’s surface with a reflection of the purple and grey peaks surrounding her edges – as if we were about to sail out into the open sky itself, paddling over the tops of trees with only the birds between us and heaven.

“You’re thinking some romantic dribble about how _gorgeous_ this all is,” Sherlock said behind me as we started to paddle out towards the center of the lake.

I huffed over the gentle sound of our wooden oars slicing through the soft water, spilling pearled droplets back into the rippling reflection of the trees and sky.

“Anyone but you would be thinking the same thing,” I said, speaking straight ahead towards the front of the canoe. He didn’t respond.

We rowed in perfect sync through the still, glass sea, and chills rose on my arms as the sun started to drop towards the tops of the peaks. The breeze carried wisps of snow-touched gold across the surface of the water, smelling of the brisk mountains and the rich, damp moss. The snow clinging to the tops of the distant mountain peaks started to glitter in the sinking sun, and the trees shook and rustled together like the earth exhaling breath after breath, settling as we glided out into her waiting, cupped hands, leaving behind the dry land and traveling through the wet reflection of the melting orange sky.

I could hear Sherlock’s breathing behind me, steady and even with his strokes. I desperately wanted to ask him what he was thinking as we paddled – whether he wanted to speak, or stay silent. Whether he wished we were out chasing wolves across the hills.

Whether he wished he could see my face the same way I wished I could see his.

The flame thrummed again at the back of my spine, right at the place where his exhaled breath was hitting my skin.

Finally, I set my paddle down into the side of the canoe, letting us drift aimlessly in the fragile center of the lake.

Everything was silent, and everything was still.

For a long time, nearly fifteen minutes, we sat without saying a single word. I thought about trying to explain to him the new flame in my chest – the one that had flared to life last night in Molly’s cabin, and which hadn’t been snuffed out by the long night, even though my bed had been cold and empty without him by my side.

But I couldn’t find any of the right words, and then I heard Sherlock swallow behind me.

“John,” he said.

I closed my eyes and shivered. His voice sounded boundless and huge across the water, as if nothing else on earth existed except the wooden canoe beneath our feet.

I couldn’t say anything back. I had never heard his voice sound like that before – like a fragile layer of glass that could shatter under the weight of the smallest leaf. I watched two caribou amble up the slope at the far side of the lake, brushing their noses through the dew in the long grass.

I let out a long breath like a sigh, and as I did, he kept speaking. “There’s . . . some things I need to say. Things I should have said . . . long ago. Right when I first saw you again in April.” He paused, and I heard his breath shake in his mouth. “But, I was . . . afraid to say them.”

I tilted my head towards my shoulder, staring down at the belly of the canoe sinking into the lake. I reached out to stroke two of my fingertips across the cool water. “Don’t be afraid,” I whispered, mostly to myself.

I could feel him staring at the back of my neck. For a long time, I thought that maybe he wouldn’t say anything more at all – just leave us tilting, balancing on the thin, liquid glass, not knowing whether the earth would swallow us up or fling us off into the sky.

Then he cleared his throat. His voice shook. “Thirteen years ago – the last time I did cocaine before . . . before the other night, I never told you about what happened.”

I shook my head and whispered, “You didn’t.”

He took a long breath. “I also never told you that I used to fancy myself head over heels in love with Gregory Lestrade.”

I gasped a surprised puff of air. “You forgot to mention that,” I said.

I felt him smile behind me. “Must have slipped my mind.”

I waited for him to go on, desperate and aching to hear the words from his lips – as if they were the only things reminding me that I was alive, and not just another part of the lake, sinking into the deep.

When he spoke again, the brief warmth that had been in his voice was gone. 

“I told him, thirteen years ago,” he said, nearly whispering. “We’d been working together a few years by then. And I thought . . . I thought I had it all worked out, you know. That I was . . . and that he was . . . and so I tried. To tell him.” He sighed, sounding angry at himself. “And of course, because he’s Greg Lestrade, he let me down in the most infuriatingly gallant way possible – all about ‘I’ll find the one,’ and ‘someone else will see you’re a good man,’ and. . it all shattered me. It . . . I thought I – well I didn’t want to --” He huffed a sharp breath out of his nose. “I thought I’d just lost everything.”

Something in the tone of his voice suddenly made sense in my mind. “You overdosed,” I said, surprised at how steady my voice sounded. A warbler sang its sweet song overhead as its wings beat through the thick evening air.

“I waited until he was away on holiday before I did it,” he went on, skipping over the actual words. “I remember being furious when I woke up. Tried to rip out all the tubes, and the nurses were there, trying to hold my hands back, asking me if I knew who I was, or where I was, or how many days it had been.”

“How many days had it been?” I asked him softly.

“Six.”

My heart was racing. “And Greg –”

“Didn’t know. Still doesn’t. He knew about the drugs – made a hard and fast rule that I wasn’t allowed in the labs with him if I was high. He was irritatingly good at being able to see through me when I was. He thinks I went on my own holiday for that week – found myself while I was ‘traveling the Irish coast,’ and that that’s what made me quit. Said he was proud of me for quitting, and ‘no hard feelings’ about what I told him before – that his lips were sealed. Neither of us have spoken about it since.”

My lips felt numb as I spoke. “Who does know about it then? That you almost died?”

His quiet answer seemed to echo through the endless valleys. “You.”

My chest ached. “Jesus, Sherlock –”

“I’m sorry for everything,” he said quickly. Before I could say anything else, he kept talking, words pouring out of him as if they would spill into the lake and cause it to overflow up over the rocky mud shores. “John, I . . . you have to understand that you are a storm. You are a hurricane. You . . . caught me up and flung me into the sky, higher than I’d ever been before – all the times when I was young and stupid and with Greg, all the times I was high – the days spent tracking wolves through every boring new wilderness . . . you lifted my feet higher off the ground than any of that. Until I couldn’t see the tops of the trees. And it was . . . terrifying. Gloriously terrifying.”

My mind reeled, desperately trying to keep up. “Hold on, but –”

“I couldn’t lose you,” he kept going, as if I hadn’t said anything at all. “Christ, John, do you even understand? You can’t see yourself – the way you . . . you _illuminate_ it all. Each day ticked by, and I flew higher and higher, and you kissed me. You . . . you fucked me – held me in the middle of the night until I . . . and my plane ticket back to London was just sitting there, the whole time. The day I would leave you behind here and have to fall, and crash back to earth. And it was going to kill me – the fall.”

He was panting – I could hear the way his lungs sucked in the air. His voice was wet. “Everything I said to you that day. John, everything I said . . . everything I did, with London, with your job. I’ve never been so sorry for anything in my life. I’ve never wished . . . wished so desperately that I hadn’t woken up in hospital thirteen years ago. That I had just stayed . . . And it was all because I wanted _you_ to stay – to stay with me, so my feet wouldn’t touch the ground. And all I did was make you think I was ashamed of you, and insult you, and drive you away so immediately you couldn’t even . . . couldn’t even hike by my side back to the Road. And I can’t tell you how much I regret –”

“Sherlock,” I said softly. He immediately stopped. I could hear him struggling for air, and a soft moan escaped the back of his throat. The canoe rocked gently over the water, and I gripped the sides of it so I wouldn’t fall into the depths and drown. 

“Sherlock,” I said again, barely able to speak. “There are . . . so many things I should have said to you last year. That we both should have said.”

“John,” he whispered. “Please, _please_ forgive me, for –”

“Of course I forgive you,” I said. The flame burst into fiery life at the base of my throat. My eyes stung. “Sherlock, I have . . .” My throat closed up, and I knew that if I kept speaking he would know I was crying. I went on. “I have missed you. You don’t understand how it was before. How alone . . . I’ve spent every night hating myself for leaving you behind that day. For not just taking a moment -- ”

“I deserved it. I deserved everything you did –”

“You didn’t deserve it. I’m so sorry –”

“I didn’t understand at the time. Last year, in the moment, I didn’t realize what this all meant –"

“Neither did I.”

“But you need to see. . . and I know it’s not like that, not anymore, you’ve said, but John, you were – you have to understand that you were –"

“I have a key,” I suddenly said. He went absolutely silent. The growing wind kissed the surface of the lake in the fresh stillness, slapping water against the canoe’s sides to cover over the sound of our breaths.

“I had it made last year,” I went on, barely speaking above a whisper. “After that afternoon where we took Lugnut outside the park – to the little clearing?”

He swallowed hard, and I could hear the slight smile in his voice. “I remember.”

“It’s brass. Hanging on a little ribbon. Opens the one door to my cabin near Talkeetna.” I clenched my hands into fists to steady my fingers, and took a deep breath. I was about to say everything – to risk being burned, to go up in flames. I was about to fall off the little rock in the middle of the rushing river.

“I can’t bring myself to throw it away,” I whispered.

The canoe rocked as Sherlock immediately leaned forward. I could feel the puffs of his breath on the back of my neck. “Please don’t throw it away,” he said quickly, urgently. His hand gripping the side of the canoe was achingly close to my own. “Please, John, not yet.”

I closed my eyes, and I moved my hand so that my fingers just barely brushed against his. He pressed back against my skin. “I won’t throw it away,” I said softly. I wrapped one of my fingers around his. “Not yet.”

I sighed when his warm palm suddenly caressed the back of my neck. He stroked his thumb down towards the top of my spine beneath the collar of my shirt. I leaned back against his hand, afraid that if I opened my eyes it would all dissolve into a dream.

“You went with me,” I said after a long moment.

His fingers still rubbed the skin of my neck. “I couldn’t let you go alone.”

I took a deep breath over my racing heart, and I smelled the mud and ice of the vast lake – the cedar on the inside of his wrists, and the wildflowers wilting in the breeze. 

“You were the first person to ever truly call me handsome,” I said. “Instead of beautiful. That night that you shaved me. . . That’s one of the things I should have said to you last year.”

Air escaped through his nose, and I felt him shift forward in the narrow canoe. My body quivered at the sound of his voice so close to my ear. “You are the most interesting person on the entire face of the earth,” he said. “The most fascinating combination of thoughts and feelings – the most intricately woven puzzle.” 

Our fingers slid together on the side of the rough, wood canoe. He held my hand. “That’s one of the things I should have said to you last year, too.”

And as his thumb stroked the back of my hand in the soft breeze, I looked down at our woven fingers, and a wolf howled in the distance, sending goosebumps up my spine. I felt him shiver pressed up behind me.

“I never wanted to throw that key away,” I whispered to him, and the flame in me suddenly burned as safe and warm as Lugnut’s fur.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> They're getting so close! So close! Thank you so much for reading. I am truly blown away by the love you all share for Ranger Watson and good ol' scientist Sherlock. 
> 
> To all of you who have shared with me how you are enjoying this story, how this story has moved you, or brought you happiness / joy / comfort, or helped you to learn, you have no idea what all of that means to me. I've been prioritizing writing new chapters instead of responding to every comment personally, but please know that I read every single one, and adore them, and read them over and over and over. They are what keep me going as I write each week! You are all so appreciated! :) And thank you especially for the seriously kind words from so many of you regarding their intimate scene together last chapter. All the thanks, once again, goes to my betas and readers.
> 
> *One quick thing I'd like to mention, just in case: Sherlock's line teasing John for being 'religiously homosexual' does not offend John (or Sherlock), and makes them laugh in the moment. It's actually something a close friend once said to me, that I've remembered fondly ever since. However, I acknowledge everyone's sense and type of humor is different. While I've written that line as Sherlock's joke to John, I in no way mean for it to represent my own views as the author, or for it to cause anyone to feel harmed.
> 
> Next week: we're back in 1991, and things are getting hot(ter). Enjoy watching these two idiots fall head over heels, and have lots more sex. 
> 
> *Next chapter might unfortunately be a bit of a longer wait. . . my time I would normally spend writing this week will actually be used up going on a trip to see Sarah Jarosz in concert. And then, the week after, I'll be at 221B Con! If you're going to con and would like to say hi, please please please do. I've never been before and am seriously stoked! Just look for the young person wandering around shyly with super short hair and a badge that says "SinceWhen_John" :) Hope to see you there! The next chapter will be up as soon as I can!
> 
> Y'all are great. Take care of yourselves.


	12. Late July - August 1991

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bluegrass: Listen to "Lay Me Down" by Loretta Lynn featuring Willie Nelson [HERE.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfZxnILzN4c/)
> 
> Sarah Jarosz: Listen to "Still Life" [HERE.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh2h63fed_A/)
> 
>  
> 
> Thank you SO much for all of your patience! The writing of this chapter got interrupted by two tiny personal trips and 221b Con, so thanks for hanging in there for the longest wait yet. I've added an 'end chapter' to this fic - you can see we're very quickly nearing the happy end!
> 
> *A quick note: John has some thoughts in this chapter (and throughout this entire fic, as you've seen) about his body that are not very healthy. I just wanted to add in a little reminder that John's thoughts about himself obviously do not reflect my thoughts as the author, or in any way show how a trans person should feel, or describe what is actually true. He's come a long way, but he's still got a long way to go. Thanks for coming along for the ride of his healing and self-love process.
> 
> That being said, please enjoy :)

Late July - August 1991

 

Sherlock didn’t spend another night in his own cabin the whole rest of the summer.

He moved into my own space without me even realizing. One day, I was pulling him towards me and kissing him in the dark, and the next day, half his clothes were taking up all my hangers, with my extra shirts and pants tossed down into a pile on the closet floor, and his dark, curled hairs were strewn across my white pillow and sheets – a black forest of life and heat and sex plastered gently across white clouds. His dusty boots joined mine by the front door to wait out the cold nights.

I would unlock my front door after a long day of hiking or work, and he would be right on my heels. I’d cook dinner, and he was by my side. I’d look up from my kitchen table to see him perched across from me, staring blankly into thin air with murmured words on his lips, or scribbling down notes while ignoring his food, or giving me a hidden look he’d think I couldn’t see.

I’d slip between my sheets at the end of the weary day, muscles glorious and aching, and his naked skin would brush alongside my own, warm in a way that made me shiver uncontrollably through my body, and he would pull me on top of him with a low moan in his throat. I would lie with him, with his steady fingers tracing up my spine, and he would hold my bones together. He would beg me to kiss him – to cover him with my weight down into the thin mattress, and he would pant my name in a way I’d never thought my name could even sound, low and desperate deep down in his strong chest – a precious whisper that only existed in the sweating air beneath my sheets.

Just like that, he started living with me. And I never wanted to ask him to slow down, or to leave me some space, or to stop. 

I never wanted to tell him that it was absolutely incomprehensible, in a way that set my teeth on edge and prickled the back of my neck, how there was another human being who wanted to come home just to see me in pajamas with stubble on my cheeks – no uniform or gun or badge pinned to my shirt – just me, quiet and stepping back into the darkness, until he reached out to run his palm up the hair on my arms in the silence, and drew me into the soft light he always managed to cast with the glow of his skin.

He wanted to come home to that, to the me that was stripped down to just skin and muscle and bone, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask him why, for fear that when he finally thought about it he wouldn’t be able to say.

Max and Babs didn’t notice. They spent so much of their time hiding away from Sherlock, brushing past with nervous gazes locked down on their own feet, that they never even realized that he was walking towards the shower house from the direction of my cabin and not from his own. They saw me walking around camp and gave their usual cheerful, young smiles. They told me about new wolf sightings, or random gossip from around the camp, and they never once stopped and asked me if I’d ever had Sherlock Holmes’ cock in my mouth.

Nick and Chris and Nathan and Hannah and Jess never noticed either. For all they knew, I woke up each morning and still, for some reason, met that lunatic Sherlock Holmes down by his truck, and I spared them all the chore of having to drive Sherlock around the Park. And maybe, when Sherlock Holmes followed quiet old me back up to my cabin, maybe we were just sharing a meal, or making plans for the next day. Maybe we were just arguing, or I couldn’t figure out how to force the man to leave me alone.

It didn’t occur to them in a million years that the very same quiet old me was grasping Sherlock Holmes’ naked back in the dark, holding his body close on a thin, shaking mattress as I rubbed the hard, aching place on myself against Sherlock’s erect penis through a layer of underwear, toes curling and sweat prickling as I came with my open lips against Sherlock’s neck.

Greg noticed, though. He noticed – because how could he not?

There wasn’t any way on earth that he would be able to miss the fact that his up-at-all-hours, restless, sharp-tongued roommate he’d known for over ten years had suddenly disappeared from their shared cabin ninety percent of the time. That Sherlock slipped back into their cabin to grab something he forgot in the early hours of the evening before slinking back to my rooms, or that Sherlock’s hair smelled like my own shampoo, or that every meal Sherlock ate came from my own kitchen.

That Sherlock wore the collar of his Ranger shirt buttoned up high, no longer open and glaring at his bared chest, because he needed to hide the marks I’d left there with my beard and mouth.

About two weeks after I woke up for the first time with Sherlock Holmes in my bed, Greg found me along the side of the Park Road. My body was drenched in sweat and mud from a hard patrol hike out down a ravine where there’d been reports of camping supplies left out abandoned in the backcountry. I was glaring against the harsh sun and squinting into the dust, waiting for one of the blessed green busses to come into sight so I could hitch a ride back to Toklat, when the familiar wheels of one of the government vans sped around the corner.

For a moment, my heart skipped an embarrassingly large beat in my chest. I thought it was Sherlock – somehow divined exactly where I was stranded waiting for a ride, come to rescue me and surprise me until I’d make him pull over the van so I could crash my lips to his own before we even got home.

It wasn’t Sherlock behind the wheel, though. The sun flashed brilliantly off the hood of the van as I waved it down, still happy to see Greg’s smile through the dust-covered windshield.

“No hitchhikers on government land,” Greg said in his best Ranger voice after he rolled down the window.

“Har har,” I said, already climbing up into the passenger seat. “Besides,” I went on, taking a moment to gulp down some lukewarm water out of my pack, “There’s a whole lot of Athabaskans who’d sure like to argue with you that this place is official government land.”

Greg chuckled as he sped off nearly too fast down one of the hairpin turns, barely skirting along the edge of the Road where it dropped off down a steep drainage into Polychrome Pass. “Oh, I see,” he said. “Make the new guy feel inadequate for not knowing the political intricacies of this place.”

I smirked out the rolled down window. “You’re hardly new, you moron. Not when it’s almost August. Most visitors who spend more than six minutes in the Visitor Center out East could tell you the whole story of the Athabaskans and the park land,” I said.

Greg groaned. “Christ, did I hallucinate and really pick up Sherlock in my car instead?”

“If I was Sherlock, I’d have called you way more inventive things than a moron, and also given you the entire park history without you asking for it the whole drive back.”

Greg smiled and tilted his head, and I looked sideways out the window to hide the faint flush on my cheeks from talking about Sherlock so openly. 

“Got a point there, Watson,” he said, sounding relieved.

We were silent for a few miles – lulled into a sleepy, twilight calm by the heavy sun against the windshield, and the steady hum of dirt kicking up under the tires into the crisp, blue air.

Then, “Noticed Sherlock’s been out and about at all hours of the night.”

Something odd flared up in my gut – the desire to fling open the car door, hurl my body from the seat, and tumble down willingly into the pass among the sharp brambles. 

I rubbed my hand over my mouth. My conversation with Greg from all those weeks ago by the campfire replayed suddenly in my mind. His firm grip on my arm, pulling me back from running away. The clarity in his brown eyes. “ _I go both ways myself. . ._ ”

I took a long breath, feeling the rumble of the van spread up through my chest. “He’s, uh. . .” I sat up straighter. “He’s been staying with me,” I said. 

I waited for the silence to feel tense and strained. For Greg to gasp out loud, or start asking a million questions, or look at me like I was insane. For him to look at me like I should stay the hell away.

Instead it passed with hardly any feeling at all. I closed my eyes in the quick silence, willing myself not to think of how my eyes had welled up only that morning when I’d woken up with my cheek in Sherlock’s curls – ashamed that something so trivial had caused my chest to tighten with sudden emotion.

Greg shot me a quick look, then spoke out over his hands lightly gripping the wheel. “He’s a different man with you,” he finally said. His voice sounded like he wasn’t fully satisfied with the choice of words he just said.

My palms started to sweat, and I swiped them once quickly on the thighs of my dirt-covered pants. “Is that a good thing?” I asked, so quietly I knew he could barely hear me over the sound of the car.

“It’s fucking good,” Greg said immediately. I thought I heard his voice choking. “It’s bloody brilliant.”

I suddenly felt like I was running back down my long driveway with my dad’s shotgun at my back, sprinting with nails in my throat and my baseball cap rubbing painfully on my freshly shorn hair. 

And in my newly concocted memory, Greg was standing there at the edge of the hot, dusty drive. Waiting for me like a mirage, and holding out a hand, calling, “ _John_.” And my younger self in the memory clung desperately to the sound of another person calling me that name for the first time, and he kept saying, “ _John. John, listen to me. You know it’ll all be damn well alright?_ ”

“That’s good,” I said suddenly, with no clue as to how much time had passed. My voice sounded like a question.

And before I could feel embarrassed over what a stupid thing that had been to say, Greg huffed a great laugh and shot me another quick glance over his broad shoulder. “Of course it’s good. Else I wouldn’t of told you that, you great idiot,” he said, smiling.

I found I couldn’t say anything back, and a relieved calm passed over my body when I realized that Greg wasn’t expecting me to. I sat back in the seat and flexed my tired ankles in my boots, and I left the window down so I could smell the cooling tundra all the way back to camp.

 

\--

 

It was Sherlock’s idea to go on that fucking backcountry trip in the first place. 

He came up behind me one late night when I was throwing together a boring dinner and put his chin on my shoulder, wrapping his huge palms up over the rises of my chest.

“We’re going out to Unit 13 for four days in the morning,” he said.

I laughed at him and kept cooking without even pausing my hands. “Oh, right, sure. Let’s hike across a glacier for three days without any preparation, on ten hours’ notice. Without securing any time off. Sounds fucking great.”

I could practically hear his frown. “Well, it does sound great because I’m bloody suggesting it. I’ve already requested your days off weeks ago. And we’ll leave at six to get an early start, so technically this is seven hours’ notice, if you know how to properly count.”

I kept stirring the pot of stew. “Should I count out loud how many times I want to say ‘no’ to you right now?”

“John. . .”

“There’s no fucking way we’re leaving on a trip like that without any prep,” I cut in. I shook my head, bumping back into the side of his face still resting on my shoulder. “Can you even hear how stupid that sounds?”

“But –”

“For one thing, the temperatures are a good ten degrees colder along the top of the Muldrow, and I know for certain you don’t have warm enough clothes to sustain that kind of wind –”

“Then I’ll just –”

“And I barely have enough fuel left for my stove to get us through one night of a normal trip – in non-freezing weather, so how in hell you expect us to be able to –”

“Christ, John, you act like you’ve never been cold in your entire life –”

“—to _survive_ without somebody finding our bodies in a sad tent the next morning. Honestly, Sherlock, why the fuck am I hearing about this only now if you requested time off weeks ago?”

Sherlock’s hands moved down to trace the soft lines of my stomach. He didn’t answer. He lifted his thumb up under my thin t-shirt and slowly dragged the pad of his finger along the trail of hair leading down into my sweatpants. 

“John. . .”

I cursed under my breath. I dropped the spoon from my unsteady hand back into the pot and unwillingly leaned back a little into his arms.

I felt the press of his warm, dry lips into the side of my straining neck. They rasped against my stubble as they slowly ached along the bottom of my clenched jaw.

“John,” he said again, in a voice so deep it sounded like it was coming from the core of the earth itself – as if the base of rocky Denali was suddenly rumbling in full force against the fragile bones of my unsuspecting shoulder.

I shivered when his hand pressed against the low of my belly, sneaking thin fingertips under the waistband of my sweats. He trailed them, the barest touch, through the soft patch of my thick hair – too light to even touch the skin, and still pulling away when my body arched up to meet the pressure of his palm.

“That’s not fair,” I breathed out. I reached back with a desperate hand and grabbed the back of his neck when I felt his warm erection press against my lower back.

“Come to the Muldrow with me,” he crooned into my ear. He rubbed himself, thick and heavy, through the fabric of his pants into my own pulsing hot skin. My entire spine contracted – a ripple of anticipating pleasure that thrummed in my blood and made the low of my gut fill with aching warmth.

“Sherlock,” I said, breathless. I gripped his neck harder beneath my palm, letting his pulse brush against my fingers. “Come on, this isn’t –”

“Don’t you want to come with me,” he whispered. He stepped forward so that I was pressed between his body and the counter. His erection was like steel against the small of my back, making my skin hot and damp with a thin sheen of sweat beneath my undershirt, wrinkled from the long day. His fingers still rested gently in the hair between my legs and at the top of my thighs, teasing the sensitive skin there and not letting me press back against his palm. My legs shook.

I opened my mouth to respond, and then immediately lost my breath when his lips pressed against the skin of my neck. He sucked me into his mouth, and bit down lightly until a small moan escaped from my throat. 

“The Muldrow, John,” he rasped, letting his lips brush against my neck as he spoke. My whole body shivered. I closed my eyes when his hand slipped out from inside my boxers, and then cupped the bulge between my legs – pressing the sock up against my body and rubbing it with his palm. I’d forgotten I hadn’t taken it out of my underwear yet from the day.

“Come on,” he whispered in a deep moan. “Come with me . . .”

I looked down at the outline of his palm cupping me through my sweats – watching his huge hand rove over the bulge as he breathed into my skin, as if I was filling out hard and wanting into his waiting hand, as if I was tenting my pants, and leaking onto the tips of his fingers. As if I was hard as steel in his stroking palm.

I shut my eyes and swallowed hard as he continued to palm me and breathe roughly against my neck.

“Yes . . .” I finally whispered back, not caring how high my voice sounded. “Okay, yes –"

Immediately his hands left my body, and suddenly I was stepping back into completely empty space.

“Good, I knew you’d see reason,” he said in a normal voice behind me, already moving to start shoving supplies into our packs sitting in the corner.

I turned around and tried to catch my breath, a laugh already burning in my chest. “You fucking dick,” I said, trying not to smile. “I take it back –“

“You said yes. Can’t take it back now, not when I’ve already started packing.”

I shook my head at him, reaching down to adjust the sock in my boxers, and ignoring the burning in my cheeks even though he could perfectly well see it beneath my beard. Ignoring that I was wet.

“You know, most people would consider seducing someone to go on some sort of death mission trip with you a pretty fucked up thing to do–"

I stopped when he looked up at me from where he was crouched on the floor with a beautiful smile twitching the corner of his lips. His eyes shone – like the first stars breaking through the thick clouds and fog of twilight to lead me back to the Road after a long day’s hike – the promise of a warm meal and thick blankets and water. The promise of home.

My laugh finally broke out when my eyes met his. His smile grew brighter, and I gave up trying to look mad and shook my head. He smirked.

“You owe me the rest of that later, then” I finally said in a rough voice. I let my eyes slowly trace down his body to the erection still thick and full between his legs, pressing out against his pants. It seemed to twitch and grow fuller under my hot gaze.

He swallowed hard, and I watched his eyes widen as he quickly looked up and down my own body – my plain, soft body covered in a thin t-shirt and sweats, and he was looking at me like he was starving, like he wanted to devour me while I devoured him. A bear come upon a fresh caribou waiting to be taken. I was making him _hard_.

“Deal, Ranger,” he said, breathless even though he tried to look normal.

-

We left the next goddamn morning at six.

I looked out through the dirty glass of the early morning camper bus window as we wound along the Road, ever aware of Sherlock’s thigh pressing against mine. His eyes were closed, trying to get in a last hour’s worth of rest before we made it out to thirteen.

I was wide awake – restless and anxious to get off the bus and get going. We never did end up finishing the deal Sherlock had started the night before. He’d packed like a whirlwind, running between our cabins and the extra shed of supplies near the camp offices all night while I sat hunched over my kitchen table with my maps and planned our route. 

I’d surprised myself when Sherlock had looked up at me from leaning over our two packs to ask if I wanted to come and go through all the supplies. I’d just shaken my head and said that I trusted him, suddenly aware that I literally trusted him with my life. The look of soft surprise on his face had made my throat feel warm and dry.

Sherlock had kept prepping until just after one in the morning, when I’d suddenly looked up from sharpening my knife at the sound of something collapsing onto the bed. I’d finished packing up and turning off the lights in the cabin, and walked into the darkened, moonlit bedroom to the sight of Sherlock passed out on his stomach across the bed, still fully dressed with his arms thrown up above his head – chest slowly heaving in an already deep sleep. 

I’d looked at him for a long time, a heavy smile on my lips – one that somehow felt weary, as if my face was tired from holding so much quiet joy. Like the muscles in my cheeks weren’t strong enough to sustain it, and it was draining me of my energy, leaving me sagging under a huge, unknown weight.

I’d watched him sleep in the darkness, listening to the soft whisper of the rustling trees outside the window. Then I’d slowly rolled him onto his back and stripped off his shirt and shoes and jeans while he snored under his breath. I heaved him under the sheets and moved his sleep-heavy limbs so I could settle in beside him, still in my shirt and sweats. And just as I’d moved to wrap my arm around his waist, he’d woken up, and automatically reached for me in the dark, and found my face with his palm before pressing a soft kiss to my mouth – just the barest brush of tired lips – before falling back to sleep immediately on my shoulder.

I’d held him for what felt like hours, wondering if it was possible to feel so many things at once. There’d been happiness – that weightless, terrifying awe that came whenever I stopped in my tracks and realized I was actually allowed to kiss and hold this man. That reckless, pumping adrenaline that burned in my veins when I realized I was flying high up in the clouds, and I had no idea if or how I would ever land.

And there had also been sadness – a bone weary, aching, sharp stab of sadness, that I had let myself grow older for four long decades, and never knew the simple, young, innocent feeling of falling asleep with someone else in my arms – the infinitesimally small miracle of my sheets smelling like sweat and sex and _him_. The wasted years of loneliness in a bed built for one.

I’d thought of Sherlock’s plane ticket back to London at the end of the summer.

Eventually I’d fallen asleep with a horrifying tightness in my throat – one that couldn’t decide whether it was bursting with elation or breathless with desperate longing. And his skin had grown warm under my palms as I held him close through the night, wary of a quiet fear scratching gently at my cabin walls.

Now, staring out the window at the young, clear sun bursting against the sides of Denali’s peaks, I felt Sherlock nudge me in the side just as the beginnings of thirteen came into view.

“Should get off here if we don’t want to deal with a steep drainage,” he said quickly, already starting to stand. “I’d rather walk this extra stretch than fall down the bloody cliff like last time.”

I huffed and hefted up my pack as Sherlock whistled for the driver to stop. “It’s hilarious how you somehow manage to incorrectly remember the start of our last big trip as ‘falling down a bloody cliff’,” I said as I nodded at the driver and followed Sherlock down the bus stairs. “Pretty sure I would remember something as dramatic as that.”

Sherlock started off into the tundra without even looking back, shielding his eyes from the dust cloud as the bus sped away. “Good god, you can be tediously literal,” he said.

“Says the man who corrects me every single fucking time I overexaggerate a time estimate,” I called up to him. I heard his laugh carry back to me on the soft morning breeze, shivering across my skin.

Just as I caught up to him I heard him muttering under his breath, shaking his head with a soft look out at the rolling tundra bathed in purple light. “John Watson, you are never boring,” he said lowly, with an expression on his face that looked like he’d never thought such a thing could even be possible to say. 

I pretended I hadn’t heard him, but walked close enough to his side that our hands brushed once, and I felt his fingers twitch against my skin. 

-

That day passed quickly. It felt like we’d hardly hiked any miles at all when Sherlock shielded his eyes from the heavy sun with his hand and scanned the distant line of the Muldrow, coming closer with every step.

“Should camp here for the night,” he said under his breath. “Hike up any farther along the slope and we’ll have to camp unprotected in the high winds. Better to stay here in the valley and leave the shelter of this brush in the morning.”

I didn’t realize I was standing there smiling at him until he frowned and scrunched up his nose. “What?”

A warm blush fluttered up my throat. I looked away, pulling my pack off my shoulders and starting to pull out our supplies. “Nothing,” I said down at my hands. “Just. . funny watching you be responsible for once out in the wilderness. Not actively trying to get yourself killed.”

When he chuckled, I laughed, too, as we knelt side by side to unroll our tent and set up our small camp. And I tried not to wonder about whether his laugh sounded the same when he was at home in London.

That night, after cleaning up our cook site from a simple dinner of oatmeal and dried fruit, we sat together in the opening of the tent and looked out at the grey outline of the glacier fading into the oncoming dark. I stretched out my legs in front of me on the firm, cool grass, and leaned back on one elbow, tingling in my skin every time our bodies touched through the gathering mist. We were silent, as we’d been mostly silent for that whole day, aside from discussing the best route together, and calling out for bears. For a little while, Sherlock had told me about some of his past wolf research in other parks over the years– which was less about tracking the wolves themselves and more about Sherlock managing to get himself in trouble with what felt like half the Park Rangers in the entire United States.

I rested my cheek against his arm where he sat next to me, with his long legs wrapped up tight against his chest. The wind blew through the long grasses in a whispered kiss, sending an eagle soaring up into the sky close enough that we could hear its wings flap against the cooling air. We both sucked in a quiet breath when a pair of antlers peaked up over the ridge of the Muldrow, now swirling in silver mist, and we watched frozen, holding our breath, as four caribou climbed up gracefully over the top, shivering against the earth and pouring strength into the cloudy breeze. We sat spellbound as the caribou clomped through the wet earth, glistening with misty dew and warmed by the last fading rays of the sleeping sun. The male caribou’s antlers cut pathways through the thick fog, and the female behind him brushed her soft nose along a bed of purple wildflowers nested in moss.

We watched them amble slowly across the thick ice, hooves cracking against the hissing sheets of frozen water, and the sound of their hooves and snorted breaths mixed with the whispered crackle of the ice sheets shifting below the mighty surface of the Muldrow, grinding against the solid earth and fracturing the foggy silence.

“I have a confession to make, John,” Sherlock whispered, not taking his eyes off the caribou in the distance.

My heart thudded. “Yeah?”

I felt him shiver beside me. “I haven’t searched for a single sign of wolf activity this entire day. Not even a paw print.”

I frowned and looked up at him – at his curls in a frizzy halo against the last billows of warm light from the setting sun, blowing gently across his long eyelashes in the breeze. “Why is that?” I asked him. I shuddered a bit at the sound of my own whisper – fainter and more fragile than his own deep rumble.

He glanced at me quickly. “You,” he said simply. His eyes traced along the curved backs of the caribou winding across the ice. “You distracted me endlessly – with your hands, and your face, and your sweat. It was endlessly annoying not to be able to banish you from my head.”

He smirked down at me, then, and I could see a softer look hiding farther back in his eyes – one that looked like that same feeling that churned constantly in my lungs, wariness mixed with hope, and joy with despair.

Waking up with him in my arms, and his plane ticket to London at the end of the season.

I shook my head and smiled back out at the rolling sheets of blue-green ice. “I’m glad you’re out here with me, too,” I said, answering what I thought was his unspoken question, and I felt him relax beside me.

Just then, a lone wolf howled in the distance, blinding through the dark fog and spilling down the slopes of the Muldrow into the trees. A chorus joined it, sending shivers down my spine. The caribou jolted up from their lazy graze and followed the sound of it with their ears, then turned and started clomping away down the mossy slopes of the glacier, rustling the brush with their legs and causing a cloud of mist to rise up from their hooves. 

I felt icy cold when they finally disappeared off into the trees and fog – so cold that it felt like I’d never even been warm in my whole life. Not even Sherlock’s arm by my cheek could make me feel anything more than the oppressive, heavy coldness of the black ice. A great shiver passed through me, numbing my lips, and I somehow knew that it wasn’t entirely due to the cold wind in the air.

Later that night, I woke up once right when the earth was at its darkest point, buried deep in my sleeping bag with Sherlock’s arms clinging around my stomach. The air outside was whispering against the walls of the tent, and far away a bird sang, echoing through the black sky. I was sharply aware of the sensation of my breath fogging in the cold air, growing humid in the warmth between our two bodies huddled together.

I realized, through the haze of my dreams, that I had no memory of ever climbing into the bag or falling asleep. I just remembered starting to shake in the cold as we stared at the place where the caribou had just disappeared over the horizon. And I remembered Sherlock’s arm settling firmly around my back, pulling me close into the heat of his side so that all the emerging stars could see.

-

The next night, night two of our trip, was not nearly as peaceful. 

We halted our hike after a brutal eight hours – hours that had involved backtracking over three miles when we realized that the side of the glacier we were ascending was separated from the way back by a gigantic crack in the ice, hissing at us with steam and gurgling beneath the weight of our unwelcome feet. We’d had to change routes again twice to avoid some male grizzlies out in the distance, and then a third time when the melting ice and snow had created a bog out of the tundra, sucking our hiking boots and shins down into the thick muck until we were soaking wet, and covered in mud, and nearly shaking we were so sore.

“Fucking knew it was a bad idea to do this,” I said as we struggled to pitch the tent against the thrashing wind on the exposed rock and ice.

Sherlock just irritatingly shrugged. “What, are you going to complain about being a little damp, Ranger?”

I huffed and hefted up the bear can to trudge it over to our cook site. “I’m taking back what I said earlier about you not actively trying to get killed. I’m pretty sure being soaking wet on the top of a fucking glacier counts as the stupidest thing you’ve ever done. And that’s saying a lot.”

I didn’t hear his reply as I walked away. My stomping footsteps echoed loudly in my ears. I shivered uncontrollably while I cooked us some of the leftover oatmeal over my little stove, cupping my palms around the gas so the flame wouldn’t go out in the wind. It howled through the thick blanket of deep green trees covering the rolling earth below us, swaying threateningly against the bottom of the sheets of grey ice and moss-covered rock surging up beneath our feet.

It should have been beautiful – the vast, unmoored swaths of grey and green and black, melting down the peaks and evaporating into the dense evening fog. It should have taken my breath away, and made me want to gasp out loud at the terrifying glory of nature, or rolled a tear down my cheek at the incomprehensible strength of the place I called home.

Instead, I was furious. It lit a warm anger deep in my chest to keep me from freezing solid. 

I was furious at Sherlock for convincing us to go on this trip so unprepared, and at the sky itself for blocking out the sun, and at the groaning glacier beneath my feet for having the audacity to exist. I was furious at myself for ever letting myself be convinced into going along with his idea – that one pathetic touch from his hands could apparently make me do anything, like I was too starving for touch to see reason, or to hold my own against the force of his will.

Furious at myself for continuing to kiss him even though he was never going to stay.

I jumped, startled, when something warm wrapped around my shoulders from behind where I sat hunched in front of the stove. The harsh, biting wind was instantly blocked from my back, and I looked down to see that Sherlock’s pale hands were wrapping his emergency blanket around my chest. 

My throat closed up with shame for being angry. I shut my stinging eyes and leaned back against him, letting him press his cheek against mine. My beard brushed against his smooth skin.

He held me for a long time as the black wind howled across the tundra, smashing the foggy clouds against the thick pockets of trees. The breath coming out of his nose warmed the skin on my face.

“We’ll be alright,” he eventually whispered, so softly I could barely hear him over the restless earth. And while I knew that he meant we’d be alright there, that night - that we wouldn’t freeze, and our supplies would be enough, and it would all end up being a story to laugh at after – I also knew in that moment that I desperately, hopelessly, foolishly wished that he was referring to our lives instead. This singular, combined life I now carried with me in my chest, knitting both of us together in the same way the highest peaks joined effortlessly with the sky, so different from the separate life I’d carried with me up until that point. Forty years of a lone wolf howling for a sight of the moon, and now that the fog had lifted, and he’d finally glimpsed its milky face, he just wanted to be told that it would be alright. That he’d see it again.

We huddled side by side in our sleeping bags later that night in the tent, unmoving and listening to the howling storm just outside. We’d zipped our bags together to make one large blanket to hold us both, and the vinyl on the bags rustled endlessly as we both shivered to get warm. Neither one of us spoke.

Eventually, Sherlock turned onto his side and nestled against my chest. My hands flew to his back to hold him, as if he would disappear into smoke if I didn’t hold him down fast enough. He breathed a deep sigh as my heartbeat pressed against his cheek, and I lay there, completely frozen, as he slowly drifted off to sleep.

I held him, and breathed in his scent, and just as the pitch of the wind reached a desperate moan across the ice, I suddenly wanted to wake him and whisper to him about one night, long ago, when I was twenty-nine years old and working in Death Valley. When I’d gone out on a camping trip with one of the other Rangers, James. 

James – whose red hair had burned like fire beneath the hot sun, and whose tanned skin shone like bronze woven across the laugh lines by his deep eyes. Whose face had lit up every time I’d walked into a room.

I wanted to wake Sherlock up, and whisper to him in the dark about another night, long ago, when I’d lain in a tent and watched the outline of a back slowly breathe just in front of me, with empty space between our bodies that felt icy cold in the thin desert air. That night, when I’d wondered if I could reach out and draw James into myself – whether he would sigh and light up like he always did whenever he saw we were working a patrol together, or whether he would melt into the strong lines of my arms. Whether he would notice that my body didn’t quite feel the way it should against his. Whether he would whisper my name.

Whether he would admit that he wanted men; that he wanted me.

I wanted to tell Sherlock, so fiercely that it felt like my heart was exploding, about how, lying there with James, I had suddenly felt like the only person alive on the whole earth. That I would wander and wander and wander for years, and never come across another human soul. Or that I was a ghost, doomed and cursed to haunt the air everyone breathed, and yet no one would ever see me. No one would ever know I had been there.

I wanted to tell Sherlock these ridiculous things, and about how I had woken up the next morning with James pressed close against my side, with his cheek on my neck, and I had let my shaking palm stroke up the side of his arm. How he had opened his eyes blearily and then sat up with a jolt, then pushed fully away from me in the terrifying silence; he’d cleared his throat and started to roll up his bag like nothing had ever happened. As if we had simply slept.

And Sherlock would have listened to me, lying there at what felt like the edge of the earth being torn away, tumbling into the storm, if I told him about how James left the Park Service a little over a year later. I’d walked into the offices after taking my month vacation off, and one of the Interp Rangers, who was just a fuzzy face now in my memory, had looked at me and casually said that James had quit and run off to go and move clear over to Baltimore. And when I’d stood there blankly and asked her why he left, with a sickening twist in my gut, she’d leaned across the desk and whispered that the rumor was that he’d left to go and live with a man – some guy he met out in the Park while he was working a shift. How she’d heard it from Karen, who’d heard it from Phil and Jeff, who’d heard it from James himself.

I wanted to whisper to Sherlock in the dark how I had covered my face with my hands later that night back in my small room. How I’d wondered why James’ face had lit up whenever I walked through an open door for all those years, and whether he had ever understood that I was gay. Why he hadn’t shared that he was, too.

Wondered whether he had simply never been interested in me – that just because we both wanted men didn’t mean he wanted to wake up in my specific arms. 

Or whether he had looked at me, truly _looked_ at me, and seen that I wasn’t enough of a man for him to ever want to run away to Baltimore with me, instead. If he’d seen that I wasn’t what he really wanted – not under my clothes.

If he’d known that I would have dropped everything just to go with him.

I didn’t tell Sherlock any of that, though, hiding away from the storm within the frail walls of the tent. I let him sleep, for long enough that I started to drift away into my own dreams beside him. But then he stirred next to me, and slowly rolled his hips, and I sucked in a rough breath when I felt the warm line of his erection pressed against the outside of my thigh. 

I forgot James Sholto had ever even existed as Sherlock wordlessly pulled me on top of him in the dark. As he started to pant and grabbed the back of my ass while I trailed my cold lips along the smooth line of his throat. I waited until my fingertips were warmed from the friction in the sleeping bags before I reached down to shove my hand up under his layers of shirts. I rubbed over his lean stomach and across the hairs on his chest, aching deep in my gut as my fingertips created shivers on his bare skin. Our breath was hot and wet against each other’s lips, and our kiss tore at me roughly in a way it never had before. I thought I was drowning in the air – that the desperate, needy sounds filling the claustrophobic air of the tent couldn’t possibly be coming from my own open mouth or his.

I grabbed his hair and tugged, and he arched his spine in a way that pressed his growing erection into the shaking skin of my thigh, and he groaned so deeply I felt the vibrations against my own chest.

Then I was lost.

He was hard for me, hard as steel, clutching me closer to him like he needed to feel every inch of my body at once. I was the one making him desperately pant, his moans echoing out across the vast, longing wilderness, and I was the one causing him to leak into his pants from the tip of his thick penis, and I was the one putting those wild moans into his throat.

He was _hard_ for me, dirty and tired and covered in sweat after a full day of hiking, and he still wanted me to wrap him in my arms, and he wanted to taste my skin.

I realized that he’d been whispering, groaning into my ear. “Fuck me,” he panted. “Christ, John, fuck me.” 

The intimacy of those words against my ear in the darkness made a wild flame flare up inside me. Heat surged up my spine, curling my toes and prickling my scalp. A gasp choked out of me as I kissed and bit frantically up his neck. I wanted, more than anything, to suddenly press myself into his body. To open him up for me, and feel his heat, and fill him with myself. I wanted to fuck him. I wanted him to be fucked.

Then I remembered. I couldn’t believe I had even forgotten.

I shut my eyes as my spine went still. “I can’t fuck you –” I started to say. My chest spasmed painfully at having to say the words.

He grabbed my face roughly and kissed me before I could finish, scratching his fingernails against my beard. “Fuck me,” he whispered again, then he reached down as I hovered frozen above his body, and he flung open his jeans and shoved them down his legs, struggling to kick them off his shins and leaving then still pooled around one of his feet. 

He looked up into my eyes, and I wanted to look away. I knew I looked ridiculous, frozen and eyes blown wide with fear. Fear and desire.

My face fell. I wanted to cover my groin with my hands. “Sherlock . . .” I whispered. My voice sounded like I was in pain. It sounded like the same voice that used to come out of my mouth twenty long years ago.

A quick sadness flashed through his eyes, one I could see clearly through the dark, and it destroyed me in my chest. For one aching moment, I thought it was sadness because I couldn’t give him what he wanted. I couldn’t be that for him – someone who held him down and pressed into his body and made him feel filled with hot desire and want. Someone whose body could be joined with his the way he was asking me to. Begging me to.

But then he put his hand on my cheek, and he leaned up to kiss me with his wet mouth, holding on to my lips as if they were the source of all his oxygen on the earth, and then I understood - that the sadness in his eyes hadn’t been because of me, but _for_ me, and I couldn’t decide which one would be worse.

He pulled back from the kiss, leaving me still frozen in the air above him, then he reached for my hand, and drew it up to his mouth. 

“Did you think I was joking?” he said in a low, rough voice. Before I could say anything, he sucked three of my fingers into his mouth, coating them slowly with his tongue while the air left my lungs. I watched my fingers disappear between his lips, my skin highlighted by the storming moonlight seeping through the tent walls. I was burning at the wet sounds coming from his mouth as he sucked on my skin and tasted my fingers on his tongue and throat. It was the most obscene thing I had ever seen – his soft, full lips stretched wide around my own skin, and his eyes boring into mine like pure fire. I kept staring into those eyes, holding my breath, as he pulled my fingers from his mouth and brought my hand down between our still bodies, pushing my fingers gently against the crease of his ass.

My mouth dropped open. “What –”

“Fuck me,” he moaned. He tilted back his head and closed his eyes as he guided my wet fingers deeper, inching closer to his hole. I gasped when my fingertip finally brushed against it. 

Never, in all the times so far that July when we’d held each other and had sex, had I gone anywhere near that part of him. I’d sucked his cock, and he’d jacked me off through my boxers, and we’d rolled and rutted together on the sheets, sometimes without even wanting to come, just so we could feel, but I’d never tried to touch him there. Never even asked. And there he was, lying on his back in a tent where the wind pounded against the thin sides, and howled and moaned across the tundra, and he was flushed red, whispering, “fuck me,” with my wet fingertips pressed up against the entrance to his body. He was begging me.

I had to be sure. “With . . .?” I asked. I touched the hot skin of his hole with just my fingertip, making him gasp and his whole body shiver. 

“Yes,” he breathed.

I didn’t want to blink. If I did, the entire world around me would disappear. I’d open my eyes and be alone out on the ice, with the black sky wailing above me and nothing but cold stone under my hands, cutting shards into my knees. I would be naked and alone, lost at the edge of the crumbling earth. I would be exposed.

My eyes blinked, though, shocked at what I was about to do, and when I opened them again, Sherlock was still lying there beneath me, panting and warm and gazing up into my face with desire.

He wanted me to fuck him. He believed that I _could_ fuck him. He was still hard for me. Wanting.

I looked at him for another moment before glancing down at the moonlit ghost of my hand reaching towards his bare skin. His cock was erect and flushed in the foggy darkness, bobbing up towards his belly which heaved with his breaths at the places where I had rucked up his shirts with my hands.

The wind howled outside, crashing through the trees. The earth shook. My fingers had dried slightly from the wetness in his mouth, so I leaned down and spat onto my hand, coating my fingers in spit. He made a choked sound in the back of his throat, then I gazed at him, searching desperately for his grey eyes in the terrifying dark, and the entire trembling earth beneath us groaned, and I pressed into his body with my finger in one long movement, until I was buried inside his heat.

“God,” he whispered. His tight skin clenched around my finger as his body shook. I gasped for breath as I let my finger slowly pump in and out of him, sighing together at the slide of my wet skin against his – at the heat of him tightening around me, letting me press into his willing body. He grabbed harshly onto the back of my neck and pulled my face close, panting across my own open lips while sweat beaded at his forehead.

“Fuck me,” he whispered again, blending into the sound of the wind.

I pressed another finger against the hot skin of his hole, groaning as he whimpered and I guided it inside. “Yeah, God –”

“Fuck me. . .” he moaned again. His eyes were desperate, and his body arched up towards mine when my fingers sunk deep into his heat. “Please. . . God, _please_ \--”

My lungs shook, and hot tightness pooled at the tops of my thighs. “Fuck, I’m . . . I’m in you. . . God---"

The storm escalated outside as I pumped my two fingers into his body, shoving him again and again into the hard tent floor. I felt like I was hurting him, and he cried out each time I thrust deeper into his ass. He clung to my back through the thick layer of my flannel, breathing out my name. The thin walls rattled and screamed around us, and rain pelted into the harsh earth, dripping through the mesh at the top of the tent and onto my back, and the fog and clouds burst and whipped across the bent trees. 

And along with it, I could feel our own movements becoming more and more desperate. Before I realized what was happening, we were tearing at each other in the tangle of ripped off clothes and unzipped sleeping bags, gasping at the heat of each other’s sweat-slicked skin in the hot, damp air. I bit his neck, so hard that I thought I might break skin, and he cried out so loudly I thought the entire Park could hear his voice. He arched and twisted below me as I fucked deeper into his ass. His cock dripped onto his stomach, searing hot and hard as steel. My own body was wet and aching beneath my clothes. I could feel it dripping down the inside of my thigh.

“John,” he moaned. It shot through the haze and the heat like a bursting star. “Christ, you feel. . .”

“Fuck. . . fuck, yes --”

“You feel. . .” My fingers twisted deep inside them, and his entire body jerked. He clung to me and threw back his head. “Christ. . . _Ah_ \---"

“Come on. . .”

Our groans and grunts and stifled gasps mixed with the raging storm beyond the thin walls, roaring in my ears and bashing against my spine turned up towards the crumbling heavens. Thunder boomed in the distance, slapping against the mountain sides and causing the ground to tremble. 

Suddenly, Sherlock grabbed my ass through my jeans with both huge hands and pulled me down on top of him, so I was settled over one of his legs and hip. The part of me that was swollen and hard pressed against his body, surging and crackling with the sudden friction, and I gripped a handful of his curls and trembled, rubbing my body against his, while my fingers made wild, wet sounds pumping into his ass, and he clutched hard enough at my back for his nails to cut marks through my shirt, while his other hand pumped desperately at his own swollen cock.

We were fucking, hard, and outside the end of the world was exploding away into the thick, black sky. The air itself was frantic as it sparked between our rough bodies, burning pure fire along my spine, and the wild air in my lungs throbbed and pulsed until I thought I’d pass out before I took another breath. Until the only air I could breathe was coming from Sherlock’s own wet mouth.

When we both came, the cry that erupted from our lungs exploded into the storming sky and blasted through the hot air of the tent. It roared in my ears in a desperate rumble, causing me to clutch and grasp at him below me out of some wild, primal need – one which sat thickly in my blood and sparked through my veins. 

Afterwards, we shared one silent, stunned look, frozen in each other’s gazes, before I collapsed into his arms. He held me, bringing his soft hand to the back of my head and panting for breath, while the world gradually softened back to the two of us lying gently on the cold ground, the only two people alive on the face of the earth.

The wind quieted, and I could hear the thrum of his beating heart. I pressed my cheek to his chest, and let him hold me, for once not caring that I was small enough to fit securely into the line of his arms, as if he would swallow me into himself, or make my bones disappear.

Somewhere deep inside me, in the same secret place where I had first uttered the name “John,” I realized I was afraid – afraid because I had just fucked this man fast and hard against the ground as if nothing else on earth existed, and because I had bit his swollen lips and cried out desperately against his skin. Because I had come with the sweat from his neck smeared across my cheek.

Because he had a plane ticket back in Toklat, counting down the short days until I would somehow have to say goodbye.

We didn’t say anything as we lay there together, listening to the wide-open earth gradually settle beyond the walls of the tent. The battered moss draped across the tundra and sighed, and the ice softened beneath our heat. Sherlock’s fingers stroked once through my hair, and I didn’t turn my head away. I wanted to ask if I had hurt him - if his cries had been pleasure or pain, but even thinking of saying the words made my gut start to churn.

Eventually, Sherlock shifted so he could reach down to pull back up his jeans and adjust his clothes. I scooted away from him and righted the sleeping bags on the ground, wiping my hand off on a shirt and burrowing down into the heat inside the bags. When he finally relaxed back down by my side, for one eternal moment, neither one of us moved. Our breaths shook in the too-quiet air, vibrating and nervous, like the eerie calm before the storm. 

Finally, after what felt like years balancing on the edge of a crumbling cliff, Sherlock’s now-cold hand found mine beneath the heavy layers. I grasped onto his fingers so tightly I could feel his bones crack.

“I’ve wanted you to do that to me since we first met,” he whispered. “To a. . . shameful degree. The thought plagued me for weeks.”

My throat closed up. For a second, I thought maybe I’d died and become a ghost – that I was imagining another life, by another me, in another place, where I was a man who got to have sex with a man like Sherlock Holmes. Where I was wanted in that way. Where I was touched beneath my clothes.

I took a deep breath and lightly squeezed his hand. We both stared up at the velvet fields of clouds through the mesh ceiling, calm and bright against the black sky after the rain.

“And when did you . . .” I swallowed over my kiss-swollen lips, then ran my other hand across my beard and mouth. “When did you know I was . . . that I –”

“Also since we first met,” he said softly. 

I couldn’t say anything back. My body prickled under the realization – that he had looked at me, and he had known, and he had still wanted. . .

He curled into my arms, then, making himself small so he could rest his head on my chest. His arm wrapped tightly around my waist. I could feel, in the grip of his fingers against my side, a quiet desperation, something untamed and flushed with longing – the same emotion that was currently thrumming through my veins and in the back of my throat. 

I wrapped my arm around his back and brushed softly over the dips of his spine. I wanted to tell him that he made me feel like I was twenty years old – like nothing of the past two decades had even happened to me, and like I was fresh, and young, and desiring, and strong. Like I could fuck someone like that all night and then do it again in the bright, new morning.

I didn’t say anything, though, as his heavy weight settled against my body. I turned my head so I could press a kiss to his forehead, and he grinned and breathed out through his nose when my beard tickled across his skin. And the waning storm moaned one last time as we both drifted off to sleep, warmed by the heat of our own bodies in the tent, and kept separate from the rest of the world by the thin, fragile walls.

-

I woke up the next morning feeling creased and sore. The freezing air stung my nose and cheeks so sharply it brought water to my sleep-swollen eyes. The birdsong floated to us through the thin tent walls on the morning mist, winding through our fogging breaths and prickling in my ears.

It felt like we were on a brand-new earth – that the storming, frightening, desperate world from the night before had been plowed over and banished, blanketed forever in this clear, bright new. It seemed impossible that the snarling wind and gasping moans had ever existed in the same place where we now woke silently with the still dawn.

Sherlock shifted beside me, and I knew he was awake. His warm fingers found the bare skin of my forearm beneath the sleeping bag.

“Should head back as early as we can,” he mumbled in a rough voice. “Food’s not going to last for another night out here – neither is the weather. I got all the tracking information I needed over yesterday.”

His calm words seemed to soar up into the air and pour cool water over the warm magic that had been hovering over the earth. Suddenly everything seemed too flat, and too plain.

I groaned and stretched to try and wake up my limbs. “Right,” I said. My mouth tasted horrible, and I could feel a bruise forming at the base of my neck from his lips and teeth the night before. We didn’t say anything more as we slowly crawled around each other in the too-small tent, yanking on layers of clothes to fight against the sharp cold and rolling up our sleeping bags, cursing when we tried to stand on our feet and tangled our heads against the top of the tent.

A weak, unfamiliar part of myself wanted to reach for his hands and pull his clothes and sleeping bag away from him – to throw them back down on the floor of the tent and say, “ _Let’s stay here. We don’t have to leave yet. We have hours. Just stay._ ”

Just when I was about to step out to deal with taking down the tent, Sherlock put a hand on my arm. “Wait a moment,” he said. I frowned at him and sat down slowly in the cleared tent, grimacing when a sharp angle of rock jutted into my thigh through the tent floor. Sherlock looked at me quickly then reached into his pack beside him, rummaging in a small side pocket before pulling out something wrapped in what I recognized as one of Greg’s t-shirts.

“Think I need a wardrobe change?” I asked nervously. I’d never seen him look at me that way before – hesitant and hopeful and determined like he was facing a war.

He smirked quickly at the joke, then reached out for my hand and placed something soft in my palm. He wrapped my fingers around it, and for one second, everything froze. He hesitated, as if he could simply remove the little gift from my hand and pretend it had never been there. As if he could still turn back.

Then he gently pulled away the t-shirt, and I realized that I was holding a cock.

I gasped under my breath and stared at it, unmoving. I could hear the beat of my own heart like a ticking clock out in the middle of the wilderness.

My mouth was too dry. “How. . .” I started to say.

“They make these now,” he cut in, voice earnest. He was avoiding my eyes, staring down too at the flaccid, pale cock flopped in my hand. 

“Obviously I didn’t just order off the shelf,” he went on. “This has unique specifications. Made by the very best, and meant to last. I gave them your . . .” He cleared his throat and looked up at me quickly with pink cheeks. “Your . . measurements. You just slip it inside and wear it in your pants, like you’ve been doing.”

I struggled to breathe. It felt like the entire earth could see into the walls of the tent – see me holding this naked, intimate thing which should be a part of my solid body instead of sitting in my palm. Hot shame crept up my neck and onto my face as I thought of the old sock I’d left rolled up back in my bedside table. The cold, fake skin slowly warmed as it sat in my palm, and I traced one of the little raised veins with my thumb.

I wanted to sink into the ground and die of embarrassment – of piercing, breathless shame that I hadn’t known this existed. That I had been walking around for decades as if I was still a teenager in my little attic, wearing my father’s old jeans and with my long hair shoved up under an old baseball cap I’d stolen. That I told everyone I was a man, but I didn’t know enough to know that I could have had a cock in my boxers all this time.

My eyes stung, and my fingers shook.

“You couldn’t have known,” he said softly, reading my thoughts. He reached out and placed his fingers on my outstretched wrist, pushing my hand holding the cock back towards my chest. There was a soft relief in his eyes when he saw I didn’t push him back away.

“Not living out here in the middle of nowhere like you’re a bloody hermit in the Bible,” he said. “It’s a miracle you even know what year it is, let alone that hyper-realistic penises exist.”

And suddenly, sitting there in an empty tent in the middle of Denali, with a naked cock in my hand, and Sherlock Holmes telling me he’d given my imaginary measurements to an anonymous person over the phone, and reminding me how lost I am in the world, I started to laugh. 

I laughed, because I had just fucked him with my hand the night before while an actual cock sat in his bag a foot away, and because the penis in my hand would never grow erect, and because he had looked at me all those months ago in a gravel parking lot, and saw everything about myself, and still wanted to ride in my truck out to Toklat.

His low, breathy rumble joined with mine, and we both shattered the thick tension that had been in the air with the sound of our quiet laughs. They were hesitant, and thin, but still, the soft smile on my face was there, replacing the exhausting sadness that had been there just moments before.

Eventually I cleared my throat and lifted up my hand still holding the cock. “Right, well . . .” I started. I didn’t know what else to say. The air grew stale.

Suddenly the thought of putting it into my pants felt incredibly vulnerable, even in front of only Sherlock out in the middle of nowhere, as if the second I unzipped my jeans and fussed around to slip the cock into the pocket of my boxers, Sherlock would look down, and gasp, as if he hadn’t noticed there was something missing before. As if the whole earth would laugh at me, a middle-aged, greying Ranger, who needed to figure out how to put a toy into his pants for the first time.

I didn’t have to make a dumb excuse for him to leave. He read the thoughts on my face, and immediately started to heave himself up to his feet to stand, crouching in the too-small tent. I looked up at him just as he was stepping out, and the entire earth stopped as we shared a silent look. 

I knew I should say thank you – tell him that I appreciated it more than I could say, or ask him whether he understood that he had just handed me a part of my own self – my own soul. That the fact that he had held this new part of me in his own hands first was the only thing convincing me that this was really real – that it could be a part of my being, and not just some useless thing shoved down in my boxers for only me to see.

I couldn’t say anything, though, as the air crystalized around us into sharp focus. It burned in his eyes like swaths of cool, grey ice, warmed by the oncoming sun to melt the steel into soft water. I nodded, once, as if that somehow made up for me not having any words to say, and then he looked at me for one last breathtaking moment before he stepped out of the tent and walked off to go clear up the rest of camp.

The sound of his footsteps crushing into the soft tundra tingled in my ears for another minute as he strode away, receding as if he was walking off the final edge of the earth, leaving me alone forever in the tiny air of a small tent. I stared down at the cock in my palm for another long moment, heart racing with sudden fear. Then I forced myself to sit up on my knees and undid the zip of my jeans with a shaking hand. The slide of the metal was deafening, as if the entire glacier below me was shattering into frozen shards. 

It took me what felt like long, sweating hours to finally adjust it correctly within my boxers – the little pouch there that I always forced myself to forget was there. The one I always sewed myself, and every time I sewed it, I heard my mother’s voice in my head, sharp as she slapped at my clumsy fingers holding a needle: “ _You’re never gonna learn to sew for shit,_ ” she’d say to me, taking another long drag of her cigarette, _”But if you’re hoping to convince some man to finally marry you and get you out of my house, you gonna learn to sew at least a goddamn pocket and a hem._ ”

When I finally got it adjusted correctly against my skin, I zipped back up my jeans and re-did my belt. For a long moment, I couldn’t look down at my thighs. I stared straight ahead at the walls of the tent, blowing softly in the breeze coming through with a whisper after the storm. 

I felt, even though it made my face burn for being a fool, that the moment I looked down and saw it there would mark a divisive line in my life – that I would forever understand the years of my existence as before-the-cock and after, and that once I looked down at the new bulge, I could never go back to the way it was before. That this would rip me permanently, forever severed, from the teenager who sprinted away down the long drive, and who swallowed hard before walking into a tiny, run down surgery room with a backpack full of cash, and who sat in that dark little attic and shaved off his hair, watching the long strands pool in tangles on the rough wood floor until they looked like a pile of straw.

I looked down.

The outline of the new bulge in my pants fit perfectly between my thighs, barely brushing up against the denim to make itself known. I twisted my hips once, and watched it move with the lines of my body. I cupped it with my palm, and felt solid, soft skin. The full weight of a cock – of _my_ cock – beneath my hand.

A single, breathless tear slid down my cheek, and I let it fall onto the flannel shirt covering my chest. A strange, warm pleasure tingled through my whole body, starting from the tops of my thighs and flooding me with something that felt a lot like relief. I slowly ran my fingertips across the beard on my face, the hard line of my jaw, and the flat plane of my chest – a physical reminder that I was John Watson – that that man belonged to me. His body, and his voice, and his name, and his cock. That he was mine.

I wiped my eyes quickly on my forearm before more tears came. I could hear Sherlock moving around closer to the tent, packing up the last of our bear can and cook site and checking the ground for any trace. My unshed tears stained the sleeve of my shirt. I remembered, all of a sudden, and for the first time in my life, words from my sister as I stood up to move outside the tent and join him.

I was nine or ten, and we’d been chasing each other out in one of fields, when I’d tripped on some scrap metal and fallen hard onto my arm. I remembered standing there, holding back tears, and then finally crying as blood started to pour down my thin arm from the fresh scrape.

We’d been playing one of my favorite games: brother and sister.

And my sister, my big sister, had rolled her eyes at me as I cried over the blood on my stinging arm. She’d told me to shut it before our parents heard, and when I didn’t stop, she’d said, “ _You can’t be a brother of mine if you cry, you know. Girls can cry, but boys can’t. Looks like you’s just a girl after all._ ”

-

Later that afternoon, we stopped for a quick break just after we came in sight of the distant Park Road. I dropped my heavy pack to the ground and rolled my shoulders under the bright sun, which was full and clear after the evening’s storm. I walked up to a small outcropping of rocks overlooking a valley and let the soft breeze blow against my face.

I didn’t hear Sherlock coming up behind me at all, until suddenly his arms were wrapping tightly low around my waist. I stopped myself just in time from pulling away, reminding myself, as I’d had to do hundreds of times, that Sherlock wanted to touch me like that, and that I was allowed to be touched. 

I watched, absolutely frozen, as his hand dipped down below the waistband of my jeans. His breath was hot against my neck as his long fingers traced the outline of the bulge in my pants. My lungs shook. He palmed me, roughly, and groaned as the weight of it pressed back into his hand. I imagined myself filling out beneath my jeans, bulging hot and swollen into his hand, so his fingers could stroke along my length. I reached back suddenly to grip the back of his head and his curls, and wild words poured from my lips as his breathing sped up against the side of my warm neck.

“Yeah, come on,” I whispered, staring down at the sight of his hand gripping my full cock. I leaned back into his arms, and let my voice drop rough and low. “Touch it,” I breathed. He moaned into my ear as his fingers continued to rub and stroke me. “God . . .”

I closed my eyes and pressed out into his touch, telling myself I could feel his fingertips still caressing my cock. “Come on, touch me,” I said. “God, Sherlock –”

“Fuck, you’re huge,” he rasped against my ear. I could feel his chest shaking against my back. I knew that I was exposed before the wide-open sky – standing in the middle of Denali with a cock in my pants, and Sherlock Holmes’ hand cupping me through my jeans. The knowledge that every cloud and mountain peak in the distance could see me, John Watson, on the first day of my new and separate life.

And I _was_ huge – visible beneath his huge hand, pushing out into his palm, filling the space in my jeans . . .

Sherlock turned me suddenly in his arms, grabbed onto my face, and kissed me. I pressed our hips together, so he could feel me against his own penis. Our soft cocks rubbed together, causing us both to sigh against each other’s lips. I knew that we could be seen from the Road where we stood, as two specks in each other’s arms, outlined by an endless swath of clear blue sky. I tasted our morning’s instant coffee on his tongue, and the dirt and sweat on his cheeks. I imagined I tasted my own mouth and skin from the night before, and my fingertips tingled at the memory of his lips closing around them to suck.

His hand wound down in between our bodies and touched me again. Our wet lips brushed together as his palm rubbed and cradled the new part of my body, sighing as he traced the length of it with his fingers through my jeans.

It felt like hours later when we finally pulled away, both panting and holding on to each other’s skin with desperate hands. I cupped his face in my palms, running my thumbs along the stubble covering his sharp jaw.

He grinned down at me, crinkling in the corners of his eyes. “You going to write me up for being visible from the Road?” he asked.

I tried to fight my smile. “You know that’s only for sleeping in view of the Road,” I said. “We’re standing, in case you haven’t noticed.”

The soft look in Sherlock’s eyes suddenly burned over with something new. “We won’t be standing for long,” he said roughly, and it was the only warning he gave before I was being pushed down to the ground, my back smashing into the bed of soft moss beneath us, and I gasped as Sherlock covered me with his long, lean body and kissed me so deeply I wanted the entire world to see.

 

\--

 

“You want a little ribbon for it or something, so it doesn’t get lost again?”

I looked up quickly from where I’d been leaning over a table of carved wooden sculptures and cast bronze. 

I couldn’t remember what the man had asked me, and guessed by answering, “Yeah, uh, sure.”

He chuckled and searched in a drawer to find something to thread through the little hold in the brass key.

“So,” he said down to his hands. “Who’s the lucky lady going to be getting her hands on this key? Another one of you Rangers?”

I crossed my arms over my chest and tried to smile. “No, no lucky lady,” I said, as if I was making fun of myself. “Just lost the old one for a few days, like I said. Figured I should have a copy made to keep somewhere safe so I’m not locked out at the end of the season when I’m trying to get home.”

The old man – the only locksmith anywhere from Talkeetna and Trapper Creek all the way up to Healy – gave me a look like he didn’t believe a single word, then stooped to bend over the counter to hand me the key.

“Didn’t think they let you leave the Park during the season,” he said. “Like you all just disappear to go play with the bears when you’re not working.”

I laughed under my breath and pocketed the key, keeping my hand closed around it in my pocket. “Ah, well, Cantwell isn’t much of a drive from the Entrance. They gave me a special pass to leave. Gave me a moose chaperone and everything.”

He chuckled and wheezed as he put his tools away into an old wooden drawer. Dust fell in sheets onto the splintered floor, and I could hear the sound of a hundred other brass keys rattling together as he pushed the drawer shut.

“Well, see you on your way back down to your place for the winter,” he said. “You can owe me a beer.”

I nodded and raised my hand before walking back out into the bright sunlight. I waited, peering through the window, until he turned around to tinker back on his work bench, then slipped some cash under the door since I knew he wouldn’t have taken it from me in person.

I shoved my cap back onto my head and climbed into my truck, piercingly aware the entire time of the extra little weight that now sat in my pocket. A cloud of Lugnut’s fur wafted up from the leather seat as I started driving back up Highway 3 with the windows rolled down. It was just the day before that we’d taken him outside the Park on Sherlock’s little field trip – a whole afternoon rolling around in the fresh grass of the clearing, where nobody knew where we were, and the earth welcomed us with warm beds of flowers, and the breeze carried only the scent of the three of us, like we were the only three beings alive. 

And it was lying there under the sun, with Lugnut and Sherlock flanking me on either side, that I had realized, for the very first time, that my life would extend beyond the day Sherlock drove away from the Park to go get on a plane. That I would continue living the next day, and the next day, and the next. That I would keep visiting Lugnut on my days off, and taking him for his walks, and ending out the Season until I drove back down to Talkeetna to hunker down for the long winter.

I would keep living, and Sherlock wouldn’t just disappear into a mist on the other side of the world, and I’d suddenly known that I didn’t want to spend a single second of those days without him.

The whole drive back, with Sherlock in the passenger seat and Lugnut awkwardly curled up trying to sleep on his lap, I’d stared at the curves of the Road and thought about Sherlock Holmes waking up beside me in my cabin. How his eyes would illuminate the long, dark nights, and his hands would warm my skin from the cold, and my sheets would smell like peppercorn and cedar instead of ice and dust. How his laugh would burst through the thick air like a warm breeze, and how his bare feet would sound on the hardwood floor, and how his hands would look wrapped around a book by the fire.

I’d thought of ol’ Lugnut curled up on the floor asleep, warming his little nose by the flames with my fingers in his fur.

So that next day, my day off, I’d woken with the sun and told Sherlock I got called in to do some paperwork out East. I’d driven out to Cantwell before I could lose my nerve, hoping and praying that the locksmith was still there (and still alive) and hovering around town killing time with some bad coffee until he finally hobbled out to his porch and turned the ‘closed’ sign to ‘open.’

Now, as I drove back towards the Park Entrance, settling in for the few hours of my drive, that key felt like it weighed a hundred pounds in my pocket – as if it was burning clear through to the skin of my thigh. I foolishly wanted to take it out and hold it in my hand, clenched in my tight fist, so it wouldn’t get lost or disappear. I wanted to hold it between my lips – this new wild, untamed hope that Sherlock would go with me back to Talkeetna – and then press it to his own mouth, a promise that when I woke up each dark, cold morning, he would be there.

Without even meaning to, I turned off the Park Road right inside the Entrance and found myself pulling to a stop outside the kennels. I leaped down and jogged towards the long line of little huts, eyes fixed on the one at the end of the row, with a wet black nose peeking out from inside.

“Alright, old boy?” I said as I walked up closer. The nose immediately flew up into the air as I sunk down to my knees in front of the hut, and soon I was tackled by a huge ball of warm fur, pushing me down into the ground and licking madly at my face. 

I held on to him with a fierce grip as he wiggled across my stomach. “Surprised to see me two days in a row, huh?” I asked. “You get in any trouble for escaping yesterday? They give you any demerits? Take away your gold stars?”

He yipped and licked at me with his tail pounding madly into the dirt, and I laughed under him, breathless already at the sharp memory of the day before, where he had tackled me in the same way on top of fresh, clear grass, and bounded across the open tundra, and barked up at the sun. Where Sherlock had curled up by Lugnut’s side when he thought I’d been asleep in a nap, and rubbed his belly for nearly an hour, and whispered things I couldn’t hear into his soft ears.

Finally he settled down, and I guided him to sit across my lap as I leaned back against the hut. His little heart was racing, and I could see that even that much action had tired him out way more than it used to. I scratched his head as he panted to keep cool. 

I was just reaching into my pocket to pull out the key to show him when Molly’s bright voice bounded across the kennel yard.

“There you are!” she called out, as if she’d been looking for me all day.

I ignored the odd stab of disappointment that flooded through my chest as I moved my hand away from my pocket, and instead reached up to shield my eyes from the sun as I grinned at her. She had a serious look on her face.

“Uh-oh, am I in trouble?” I asked, half-joking.

She gave me a sharp look. “Actually yes, Ranger Watson,” she said. She stopped in front of me standing tall with her hands on her hips. “You went on a bit of a field trip yesterday,” she spoke down at me. She glared at Lugnut and pointed down at his face. “And you, sir, you went along with him!”

I tried to look abashed, but I could also see the slight grin hiding in the corners of her mouth. I raised up a hand. “Guilty as charged,” I said. I raised up Lugnut’s paw. “He’s guilty, too.”

She huffed and rolled her eyes, then scowled down at Lugnut who’d rolled over onto his back begging for a belly rub. She looked off into the distant trees for a moment and took a long breath. “Honestly, John, what the hell possessed you to steal a sled dog from a park? I mean, honestly.”

And it suddenly dawned on me, sitting there, that she had absolutely no idea that Sherlock had been involved. That Greg hadn’t told her a word of our conversation the other day. She didn’t know that Sherlock had woken up beside me in my bed, and dragged me out East, and slipped Lugnut’s lead off the metal pole next to his hut, and drove us all straight out of the Park in my truck.

It shocked me how desperately I wanted to tell her in that moment. I wanted to stand up, and look her in the eye, and tell her that Sherlock would be the spark of life lighting up my cabin all winter. That I liked men, and that I liked that specific man, and that I currently had a brass key burning a hole in my pocket. That Sherlock had held Lugnut out there in the open field before kissing me in the soft grass below the wide open sky.

But a flood of fear rushed through my chest just before the words could leave my lips. I closed my mouth against the sudden words and cleared my throat instead. “I really am sorry, kid,” I said once I knew I wouldn’t blurt out that I’d had sex with Sherlock Holmes. I rubbed the back of my neck. “Something just came over me, I guess. Needed to get out of the Park for a few hours, and I decided to take him with me.”

I hefted up Lugnut and held his face next to mine. He licked at my cheek. “You know, he just looks so sad,” I said, grinning a little. “So lonely. He needed to get out of the Park. He told me himself.”

She mumbled under her breath before plopping down to sit next to me in the dirt. “You men are all the same,” she said, shaking her head and twisting a strand of her hair around her finger. “Just do whatever you want without thinking of any of the consequences. Like, you know, how I had to make up a story for Dan on the goddamn spot about why and how our oldest sled dog was suddenly MIA.”

Shame burned through my cheeks. “Shit, Molls, I should have thought . . . God, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have –”

“I know, I know, you’re sorry,” she said. She gave me a soft look, then reached over to scratch Lugnut’s ear. “Honestly, I was kind of happy for you when I figured it out. It’s refreshing to know you can actually be spontaneous and break a rule – not just a robot who’ll fall apart if he doesn’t follow his minute-to-minute routine.”

I laughed, even as I tried to look offended, then shifted a bit in the dirt until my shoulder rested against hers. We were both silent for a moment, watching Lugnut slowly drift off to a happy sleep with his tongue hanging out of his mouth.

For one more second, as if I was balancing at the top of Denali’s peak, I wanted to turn to Molly and tell her what had happened the day before – the real story. How soft Sherlock’s lips were against my own mouth, and how I’d wanted to kiss him from the first moment he stepped up in my truck, and how he was currently waiting for me back in my cabin – in _our_ cabin – thinking I’d just spent the day filling out paperwork on the East Side instead of getting a little brass key tied to a ribbon. 

I looked at her and reached over to smooth down her brown hair. “So,” I said. My heart beat in my chest. “That’s the only exciting new thing about me. Tell me about all your romances with Greg.” 

I smiled at the blush that spread over her cheeks, even as my chest unexpectedly ached, and she sat there for a few minutes telling me all about their last trip into Fairbanks, and their upcoming backpacking weekend out into Unit thirty-three.

I waited until she was long gone from the kennels, with no other Rangers in sight, before I finally reached back into my pocket and pulled out the key, letting out an embarrassing sigh when I confirmed it was still there. Lugnut’s ears perked up, thinking it was a treat. I held the key in my palm in front of his nose while he sniffed it, and he pawed at my hand and fingers gently with his claws.

“I know, it’s not really necessary,” I told him as he tried to lick at the brass. “Feel sort of ridiculous, actually. Not like he needs his own key. Not like he’s actually even said yes yet, you know.”

Lug started to whimper under his breath when I wouldn’t let him take the whole key into his mouth. I rubbed my thumb along his nose. “I just . . . I need something to actually give to him, old boy. You know, it’s . . . This feels big.”

I nearly cringed at myself. A middle-aged man figuring out how to ask someone to live with him for the very first time. It made me feel stupid and naïve, too young to know anything of the world, and too young to deserve the likes of a man like Sherlock choosing to survive the long winter hours by my side. 

Lugnut looked up at me with his wide, grey eyes as if I was the sun itself, and his ears twitched forward. I bent to press my forehead to his snout. “This feels really big,” I whispered again, and he nuzzled his face against mine.

\--

The key was still in my bedside drawer two weeks later. 

I’d planned to shove it in there the second I got home, knowing Sherlock would instantly find it if I kept it in my pocket, and that he never opened the bedside drawer to keep my privacy about the sock. 

He’d been pouting on the couch with his legs up against the wall when I got back, demanding to know why paperwork had taken me almost the entire day and deducing what too-slow speed I drove on the Park Road to get back so late. My fingers had lingered over my pocket, tracing the outline of the key where I stood behind his shoulder so he couldn’t see. 

Then he’d looked back up at me with wide, soft eyes and asked if I wanted to go for a walk down the riverbed, because he was bored, and because he had some new theories he wanted to test by explaining out loud. I couldn’t bring myself to say anything other than, “Of course.”

So I’d leaned down to kiss him, and then quickly walked into the bedroom to get a heavier coat. I’d slipped the key into the bedside drawer, opening it softly and slowly so he wouldn’t hear, and I’d told myself that the next day, or maybe the next, I would pull it back out and ask him if he wouldn’t get on his plane at the end of the summer.

Two weeks later, it was starting to gather dust next to the sock. 

I had the words all planned out in my head, or so I thought. Exactly how I would sit him down, and look him in the eye, and somehow tell him that I finally realized that my life would continue beyond August, and that the sun and stars and clouds would never look the same if he wasn’t looking up at them by my side. 

That I needed to keep loving him, even though those very words shot wild fear down my throat. Even though I didn’t even know if they were true.

But the days passed by, and we kept arguing over the kitchen table, and driving down the Road in my truck, and chasing wolf tracks across the tundra, and waking up side by side. We kept talking about nothing instead of the fact that Sherlock was still planning on going home at the end of the summer. We kept teasing each other and calling each other idiots instead of talking about the fact that I had a key to my cabin hidden in a drawer.

We didn’t have sex, though. Not really. Not like that frantic, breathless hour writhing on top of the Muldrow in the storm three weeks before. 

Each day that passed since I first put the brass key in my pocket, something held me back more and more from touching his skin. I’d think of that day two weeks ago out in the field, how soft his lips had been against my own, and how the sun had warmed his hair, and then I’d think of the way I’d roughly shoved him down into the ground on top of the glacier. The way I’d bruised his delicate skin. And the hot shame that overtook me made me not even want to look at his naked body. As if the gaze of my eyes alone would hurt him again. As if I couldn’t even be trusted with a simple kiss on his neck.

The fact that we now fell asleep each night after just a few kisses sat heavily between us, thick enough to slice. It was a cold, foggy haze that settled like lead on my limbs, halting me back from clutching him to me the second we climbed beneath the smooth sheets. 

If I was honest with myself, the memory of our sex that night in the tent frightened me. It scared me how desperately I’d wanted to press into his body, and how wildly I’d grabbed him, and how I’d come harder than I ever had in my life with my fingers up his ass and his whispered groans of “ _fuck me_ ” vibrating in my ears. How I’d left bite marks on his neck. 

It felt like too strong of an emotion, too enormous of a desire, to be contained safely within my small, plain body. I felt ashamed – that the moon and stars had seen Sherlock Holmes being fucked by me, of all people, instead of a man who was glorious and tall and strong, who had a thick cock between his legs, and a rough, rumbling voice. I felt like I’d revealed too much, been stripped too naked, when I bit the skin of his neck between my teeth, and then begged him to come with me buried deep inside him.

When I’d come out of the tent the next morning with the remnants of a tear on my cheek, and the new cock in my pants, and I knew Sherlock could see that I’d crouched in the tent and cried. 

And it felt like Sherlock Holmes would never say ‘yes’ to staying the winter with that person. That he would want the man who’d softly held him out in the wildflower field, and not the wild, grunting animal who’d pushed his back down against the ice.

And I didn’t think that I could be just one without the other.

He would look at me oddly, sometimes, when he started to kiss me in our cabin, or out in the wilderness, and I would go along for a minute before slowly pulling away. He’d notice me clench my fists instead of caressing his arms and back. 

I wondered what that odd look in his eyes meant, every time he let me step back from his arms or scoot away an inch in our bed to go to sleep. I wondered if he was sad, or angry, or hurt. I wondered if he was asking himself why I’d let him press me down into the grass on that day out with Lugnut in the clearing, and jack himself off against my own cock, and kiss me beneath the sun, and why we hadn’t done the same thing since the moment we set foot back in the Park later that day.

I wondered if he still wanted to touch me there. I wondered if he was frightened by what had happened on the glacier, too.

If he knew about the key in my bedside table holding me back, like a golden shackle around my feet, whispering in my ear that I’d go and ruin my own dream before it even began.

And then, everything changed, the end of that first week of August.

We came back exhausted from a full day spent out East. There’d been reports by visitors of wolves suspiciously close to the train depot and the Visitor Center, and Sherlock had spent the day with his nose two inches from the soil while I tried to fend off curious visitors, and keep him from calling anyone a moron for stepping on the tiny piece of wolf fur he was trying to study on the trodden ground.

It had been a long and grueling ten hour day of being ‘Ranger Watson’, with one particularly tense hour spent with my hand on my gun as a family got far too close to a mother bear when they ventured off the roadside trail, startling her into fiercely protecting her hidden cubs. 

It was everything I sometimes hated about being a Ranger – the paperwork, and the crowd control, and the questions, and the noise. And the entire time as we wound through the sea of people and busses, I’d been dangerously aware of Sherlock’s body by my side – making sure I didn’t look at him too much, or track the curve of his back with my eyes, or speak to him in a way that sounded far too familiar. Making sure nobody could look at us and tell that we woke up in the same bed.

It felt even more exhausting than all those years back in Canyonlands when I’d waited, week after week, for Robbie to recognize the naked body he’d seen in the shower house as my own.

Sherlock was oddly restless the whole drive back to Toklat in the truck. He placed his hand on my thigh, higher up than he would normally rest his palm, and for miles I tried to ignore the low sizzle of heat caused by his fingers.

I daydreamed as I drove, following the curves of the Road by muscle memory alone. I let myself imagine, for a few precious minutes, what it would be like if I let that frightening part of me be unleashed again. I imagined stopping my truck off the side of the Road in the dirt, and climbing on top of Sherlock’s body on the bench front seat, and shoving him down wildly against the hot leather. I imagined what sounds he would make if I kissed him deeply and wound his legs up around my lower back. If I tasted his long neck, and pulled my fingers through his thick curls, shoved his hand down into my own pants so he could hold my cock in his hand. If I ripped his shirt open so hard the buttons tore off and flew. 

I daydreamed, with a heat rising up in my cheeks, what the marks my beard left on his bare chest would look like in the clear light of day. If his moans would sound louder within the small truck, and if we would rock it on its wheels, and if someone would drive by and see my hand pressed up against the steaming glass. If Sherlock would beg me to fuck him, or scratch and bruise across my back. How his dripping sweat would taste as it dripped down over his bare nipples.

“Everyone should be banned from this Park except for Rangers,” he suddenly said in the silence. I jumped, startled, and felt sweat prickling under my arms, as if he had somehow known I was thinking of practically attacking him in the front seat.

But I looked over, and his face was entirely calm – mildly irritated as he went on about his frustrations from the day.

“Utterly tedious having to deal with them when there is actual research to be done. Trampling all over my data like brainless idiots instead of letting me do my work.”

I chuckled under my breath and shook my head, inwardly ashamed that I had been thinking of fucking him across the truck seat while meanwhile he was sitting there innocently pondering his research.

I reached over to pat his leg. “Some people would actually say that the Park is _meant_ for those ‘brainless idiots’ to come and visit it,” I said, holding back a laugh. 

“Oh don’t tell me you actually believe that nonsense,” he said. He clenched a fist in front of his mouth. “It’s about preserving the land and wildlife, a place set aside for serious study, not being a bloody photo-op for retirees from some dreadful place like South Dakota.”

“Watch yourself,” I said. “A few years from now and _I’ll_ be one of those retirees from South Dakota.”

He fluttered his fingers dismissively in the air. “You know what I mean.”

I looked over at him, where he was huffing like a pouting child in the truck seat, with his legs pulled up to his chest and his arms crossed around them. The sight of him brought a soft, fond smile to my lips. I swallowed hard and reached over to brush a single curl behind his ear.

“We’ll go back later this week on a weekday,” I said. “Early in the morning – won’t be nearly as many people.”

I saw a quick relieved smile grace his mouth from the reflection in the truck window. “You hate it too,” he said a few minutes later. “The crowds and the people. Having to be a Ranger like that.”

I nodded out at the winding Road, squinting as the sun rays glared over a distant peak and covered the dirt and tundra in a fog of gold. “Yeah,” was all I said back. “Sometimes.”

We were silent the rest of the drive back to camp. Eventually his fingers found my thigh once more, and he traced up and down the seam of my uniform pants. It made my legs start to vibrate with a low, deep warmth, one which grew and grew as each mile passed, until I was breathing hard in my chest by the time we finally pulled into the gravel lot.

He followed so closely on my heels up to the cabin that I thought he might trip. The second I closed the cabin door behind us, his hands were on my sides, and his wet lips on my mouth.

I gasped at the kiss, deep and rough as it stole my air. Sherlock’s tongue licked wildly into my stunned mouth.

“Christ,” he breathed. He walked me backwards towards the bedroom. “You have no idea . . . watching you like that all day . . . the way you just . . . your voice, and your gun --”

I clung to his shoulders so I wouldn’t fall, already moaning desperately against his lips. I could feel that flame within me starting to spark – that wild, untamed thing that had consumed me on top of the Muldrow that storming night. The one I had avoided for over two long weeks. 

I started to ache in my pants. He hadn’t kissed me like that since that day with Lugnut outside the Park.

“What’s this ---?” I tried to ask. The breath left my lungs as his lips found my throat, and he sucked, tasting me, while his hands gripped the muscles in my back. I arched my chest against his, and a high sound escaped my throat.

He growled in my ear. “I want you,” he moaned. “Fuck, I want you. John, you’ve no idea. . .” he panted against my lips in another deep, crushing kiss. His fingertips scratched roughly at my beard. “I need . . . Christ, John, please –”

His voice had grown high and desperate as he begged “ _please_ ” against my mouth. Already his erection was tenting the front of his pants, pressed thickly into the bottom of my stomach where our bodies were shoved together. His words cascaded down my spine in warm fire – the eroticism of his voice, the hard grip of his hands on my skin, the untamed desire that blazed in his eyes. It was everything that had terrified me three weeks ago, and I wanted it, so badly I nearly cried out and sunk to my knees.

I wanted him, in a way that consumed my entire chest with fire – an avalanche of rough need that pulsed freshly in my blood.

I realized that he had loosened his grip around my back. He was looking down at me, waiting, with wet and open lips.

He was waiting for me to tell him yes. Or no.

My eyes suddenly grew embarrassingly wet at the corners, and I reached up to hold his face in my hands. The cabin seemed unnaturally silent now that he wasn’t panting into my mouth, or walking us roughly across the floor.

I took a deep breath, and I forced myself to speak. “I’m sorry,” I said. 

I blinked hard, shocked at myself.

It hadn’t been at all what I was going to say. I had meant to tell him ‘yes.’ To tell him that the whole drive back I was imagining fucking him in the front seat of my truck like a teenager, and that I wanted him too, desperately to my core. That this was how it was clearly supposed to be – our hands on each other’s skin – and that the sight of him in his tightly buttoned up shirt sent a pulsing ache down my spine.

Instead I sighed and rubbed my thumb across his cheek. “I’m sorry,” I whispered again. Before he could say anything back, I made myself keep going. My voice was choked. “I was . . . I was too rough with you before. When we were in the tent. I don’t . . . know what came over me. Why I hurt you, but –”

“Did you think I didn’t want that?” he asked.

My breath froze in my lungs as his eyes widened with understanding. “Is that what all of this has been about the past few weeks?” he asked softly. He lightly touched my cheek with his palm. “You . . . not wanting to . . did you think I didn’t enjoy it?”

My face burned. I wanted to open my lips and tell him in the silence that he was only partially right – that I had a key burning a hold in my bedside drawer, and that I wanted him to say yes to living with the man who’d softly held him beneath the sun. That I wanted a dream where nothing terrified me anymore. 

Where I didn’t terrify myself.

“I don’t know,” I finally whispered.

His eyes looked soft and sad. He leaned down slowly to kiss my mouth, slowly enough that I had time to pull away. I let him kiss me, sighing under his lips with something that felt like relief.

“I have something to tell you,” he said, with his cheek pressed to my own. I could feel his heart racing in his chest. “My own reason I’ve been . . . hesitating.”

I pulled back to look into his blue-grey eyes. They looked uncertain and soft.

“What is it?” I asked him. My whisper sounded far too loud in the silence.

He looked at me for another moment before stepping away. I stared, heart thudding, as he reached high up in my closet, moving something aside on the very top shelf before he pulled something down with his hands. He took a small breath before turning to face me, and I gasped when I realized he was holding out an erect cock towards my chest, the same material and color as the flaccid one currently in my pants, draped with black leather straps.

We both stared at it, unmoving. I imagined I could hear my blood pulse through my veins. I didn’t reach up to touch it.

“What –” I started to whisper.

“You can say no, obviously,” he said in a rush. His voice was slightly shaking, as were his hands. “I ordered this after . . . after that day outside the Park. In the clearing. It was so . . .that day was . . . and you were so . . .” he paused and huffed, frustrated at himself. “I – I want this, John. If you want this, I want this. I want . . . you. In me. I haven’t known the last two weeks how to tell you, how to show you that I’d bought it, and then we were so distant, and I’ve hated it, absolutely hated not . . . being with you. You holding me, and your body, and then today, you . . . Christ, I couldn’t stop looking at you. Wanting you. So. . . I’m telling you now.”

He paused for breath and looked up into my eyes, waiting for me to meet his gaze. “I want you like this,” he said in the barest whisper.

My mouth was hanging open. I lifted my hand to gently touch the cock, tracing a fingertip along the base of it and across part of the lush leather. I’d never seen anything like it before in my life, never even _known_. . . I swallowed hard against the familiar shame that started to creep up again in my throat.

“You want me to . . . with this?” I finally asked.

I heard his breath shiver on his tongue. He swallowed. “Yes.” When I didn’t respond, he went on, “very badly.”

I finally reached up with both hands to take it from his, cradling it close to my chest as if it would break apart. I spoke down to the raised veins and flushed head of the fake cock. “I’ve never done something like that, before,” I said in a low voice. “What happened on the glacier. I . . . the more I thought about it I didn’t know if you had . . . I didn’t know what happened –”

“I trust you,” he said. He put a hand on my arm. “I don’t know what this is either, but . . . I want it.” His mouth twisted, as if he was afraid of his next words. “I want you,” he said again.

That’s what did it.

The air in my lungs left in one long, shaky sigh. “Ok,” I breathed. I stepped back and squared my shoulders, trying to look normal holding an erect penis cradled in my hands.

I glanced up at where he was standing frozen in the middle of the floor, eyes bright and nervous, with a flame hiding behind the soft blue.

“Let me just . . .” I said, gesturing to my hands. 

He shook his head as if coming out of a daze and quickly nodded. “Right. I’ll just–”

He turned away from me quickly and started unbuttoning his shirt. I could hear him panting from across the room, trying to control his breathing.

My own lungs felt like they were being squeezed through ice. I could barely control the shaking in my hands as I set the cock down on my bedside table and started undoing my belt, slowly stripping off the layers of my uniform piece by piece.

I was floating through a dream. It couldn’t be possible that I was unbuttoning my old familiar uniform shirt, unpinning the old nametag on my chest, and pulling down the zipper of my pants. It couldn’t possibly be real that I was about to look down and see a penis jutting out from between my hips, and that I would somehow watch it disappear into Sherlock’s body.

And I knew, as I slowly guided my pants down my legs, that I should probably feel embarrassed that I needed to have Sherlock buy me these missing parts of myself – these parts I didn’t even know I could have until he showed me. I knew I should be flinching away from that same terror within myself – that I would lose control, and lose all sense of myself, and come back to reality panting and desperate as I shoved him against the ground, while a storm screamed against the cabin walls.

Instead, as I stood fully naked in my room, and felt the first wisps of the cool leather straps glide up my bare legs, I only felt hard. I had never taken off my boxers in front of Sherlock before. I could see, looking down through the patch of my thick hair, that already I was swollen at the thought of what I was apparently about to do. Wetness pulsed between my legs, and my small erection grew.

I shivered when the straps finally sat around my hips and below my ass. The base of the cock pressed up against my own skin, shooting heat up my spine and flooding my gut with want. I tightened the straps with shaking fingers, making sure it wouldn’t move around unnaturally against my skin.

Then I touched it.

I moaned beneath my breath as I watched my own hand close around the cock, almost too huge to fit in my palm, flushed and bobbing out in the air. I stroked it slowly from the root to the tip, trailing my fingertips over the soft veins and trembling when I pressed the cock back against where I was aching and hard, rubbing it against myself until the pleasure pulsed hotly through my limbs.

I was going to be inside him.

I could hear that he was finished undressing behind me. Slowly, with a racing heart and numb legs, I turned around, grasping the base of the cock with my hand.

He gasped when he saw me, and his eyes pooled black. 

“John. . .” he rumbled. My nipples pearled. The sound of his voice made my face flush with sweat. His erection grew thicker as his eyes slowly traced up to my chest and back down again, staring at the cock jutting out from my hand.

I pumped it a few times as he watched me, unblinking, getting used to the feel of a heavy penis against my palm.

“Christ. . .” he breathed. His chest flushed pink.

I spoke before I could stop myself, even though I knew my voice would shake. “Look at me,” I said.

He whimpered in his throat, and his eyes didn’t leave the cock. “John. . .”

I moaned as I stroked it again, arching into the pressure of it against my swollen skin. “What do you want?” I whispered. I could barely breathe.

Before I could react, he was rushing towards me across the room. His hands grabbed my shoulders and walked me back two steps until my back slammed against the wall, then he sunk to his knees at my feet and grabbed on to my thighs. The cock sat heavily just inches from his lips. He licked them, and then looked up at me with half-lidded eyes. I imagined I could feel the hot exhale of his breath against the tip of my new cock, bobbing near his open mouth.

His palms traced up the hair on my legs. “Let me suck you,” he said in a rough voice. “Please . . .”

My eyes slammed shut as my head hit back against the wall. “Fuck,” I whispered. My shaking hands grabbed weakly onto his shoulders. Suddenly I felt the press of his nose and cheek in the dip of my thigh, breathing in deeply against my pubic hair with a rough moan in his throat. For a second, I wanted to quickly pull back. He had never seen me there, not naked and bare where I kept myself covered with my boxers. He had never truly seen the real lines of my body between my legs – the way that it looked.

Then I realized that the base of the cock was covering everything except for my hair. That all he could see was an erect penis hovering near his open mouth, waiting to be sucked.

I looked back down at him over the heaving form of my chest, and I gave him an almost invisible nod. 

Then I watched as the impossible happened. As his open, wet lips moved towards my erect cock, and his eyes gazed up at my face, and I slowly, heavily, disappeared into his mouth.

His lips stretched wide around me, and he immediately closed his eyes and moaned. My hand flew to the back of his neck, cradling the skin.

“Fuck,” I moaned. “Fuck, _fuck_. . .”

He groaned and grasped the base of the cock, pumping it between his lips. When he pulled back, he left a glistening wet trail from his mouth. I struggled to stay standing without collapsing to the floor as he licked slowly at the tip of the cock, surrounding it with his wet tongue. Then he took me down in his mouth all the way to the base, until his nose brushed against my hair, and I felt the hot exhale of his breath.

My fist clenched around a handful of curls. “Oh my god,” I breathed. I held his head down over my cock, arching my back so I pressed deeper into his mouth, sliding farther down his throat. The friction pulsed like fire against my aching skin, rubbing me off from the pressure of his tongue. “Oh my god.” 

He moaned, and I felt the barest hint of vibrations from his warm lips. “ _Oh_. . .”

I was lost.

He sucked me down over and over, grasping hard onto my thighs and guiding my cock between his lips. His saliva dripped over his stretched lips and down his chin, and I looked down breathlessly at the sight of his head bobbing over my penis. He moaned at the taste of me, gasping when I pumped into the back of his throat. My thighs shook with the effort of not losing control and wildly fucking into his mouth.

Tears stung in my eyes.

It should have been humiliating – nearly crying like that during the first blow job of my life. But I wanted to look up to the heavens and let the tears fall. I wanted to cry out that I was finally alive, at forty years old, that I could _feel_ , and that I was erect. That I had an _erection_ between Sherlock’s wet lips.

That I was John Watson, every part of John Watson, with Sherlock Holmes on his knees. 

I heard a wild whimper escape Sherlock’s throat, and I focused my eyes through the heat and haze to see his elbow pumping down by his waist. Realization slammed into my chest and knocked the breath from my lungs. He was masturbating, with his eyes closed in bliss and my cock in his mouth. With spit dripping down his chin, and my hand making his head bob in a steady rhythm so I could feel every press of the cock on my skin.

“Oh god, you’re . . .” I tried to say. “Fuck, come on.” My face burned, and I shut my eyes. 

“Suck it,” I whispered. “God, fuck, _suck it. . ._ ”

He groaned loudly in response and sucked me deeper down his warm throat. The fingers of his other hand raked through my pubic hair before bruising at my waist.

The sounds of our wild breaths and the wet suck of his lips filled every inch of the cabin, naked and obscene. Suddenly, with piercing clarity, as the heat pooled between my hips, I realized that I was going to come with my cock down his throat.

“Wait wait wait,” I gasped out. I pushed his shoulders quickly back from my body, guiding his lips off the cock until just the wet tip sat heavily on his tongue. I sucked down a deep breath, trying to calm the sudden thrumming between my legs.

He looked up at me with huge, black eyes. His fingers caressed his own penis, which was thick and dripping from the tip.

“Fuck, I was gonna come,” I said breathlessly. I closed my eyes and chuckled under my breath. I heard him kiss the tip of the cock before leaning back on his heels, panting hard.

“I fail to see the problem,” he said in a rough, cracking voice. I looked down again just as he was wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. His eyes glinted.

I laughed again, feeling like I could soar up through the ceiling and straight into the sky. Giddiness surged in my chest.

“I’m not young anymore,” I said. I reached out to smooth the curls back from his sweaty forehead. He leaned into the touch. “Can’t go twice in one night.”

He opened his mouth to argue, but I cut him off. “Besides, I want to. . .” I looked quickly at the bed, and a rushed sigh left his chest.

“Yes,” he moaned. Suddenly he was up on his feet before me. He grabbed my shoulders and pulled me in for a wet kiss. I told myself that his mouth tasted of me, that I was tasting the liquid from my own penis instead of the faint plastic-like taste left on his tongue from the cock. I told myself that I had leaked down his warm throat.

We stumbled over each other as I started to walk him back towards the bed. My cock bobbed as I walked, still shiny from his wet mouth.

“John,” he whispered, right as the backs of his knees hit the mattress.

And there was something in his voice, something secret and golden, that made me realize that everything was clear – that I knew who I was, and what this was, and what to do.

He trusted me.

I pushed him roughly down onto the bed and covered him with my body. His warm hands clutched instantly at my back, tight enough that I couldn’t have pulled away if I tried. I licked up his neck and listened to him gasp and moan before sitting back on my heels, staring down at his flushed and panting chest – the sheen of sweat covering the lean lines of his stomach.

I stared down at his ass, the warm crease hidden between his strong thighs and beneath his rock-hard cock. 

Something small and cold was thrust against my chest. I looked down at a tube of lube clutched roughly in his hand.

I blinked at it, even as I took it from him. “How did you –?”

“Don’t ask stupid questions.” He flicked open the lid with his thumb. “Come on.”

I didn’t ask anything more.

My lungs ached as I covered my fingers and warmed them with the lube, then finally pressed them into the same warm heat of his body from three weeks ago. I sighed as the heat of him rushed across my skin. He pulled his long legs up to his chest as I stretched my fingers into his hole and shivered at the tightness inside of him. He clenched around me and rocked himself down deeper onto my fingers.

“Come on,” he said again.

I laughed. “Be patient –”

He reached down, grabbed my hand, and pumped my fingers hard into his ass. “John,” he moaned. 

I shook my head at him, pretending to be exasperated even as hot desire flooded through my thighs. 

“Jesus,” I said under my breath. My fingers slid wetly out of his dripping, open hole, leaving him stretched and waiting for me. He squirmed on his back and reached down to grab my side with his sweating palm. He pulled me closer to his body, until I was nested in the V of his open thighs. 

He grabbed the lube and poured more into his palm, then he sat up on one elbow and reached forward to stroke his hand down my cock. He pumped it slowly until the entire thing was wet, and I looked down breathless at the sight of his hand slowly jacking me off. I looked thick and heavy and huge in his palm.

“Watch,” he said roughly under his breath. He rubbed his thumb over the slit before pumping my cock again with his hand. Wet sounds filled the room.

“Look at yourself,” he whispered. “Look at my hand on your cock.”

And that word, “ _cock_ ” in his low and desperate voice, made me shut my eyes, and an embarrassing noise escape my throat. I grabbed his wrist to stop him, suddenly certain I would come. 

“Wait,” I breathed.

He chuckled under his breath, and I opened my eyes again to see him staring up at me with a fondness so clear that it ached. His long eyelashes fanned out over his piercing grey eyes, and those eyes were currently tracing the lines of my old face, with a soft smile on his lips, as if he couldn’t get enough of the sight.

I couldn’t stare back into the force of it, and I had to look away.

“Have mercy,” I finally said back quietly, half-joking, and he hummed. He gave me one last slow stroke up my cock before wiping his palm off on the bedsheets at his side. He fell back on the pillows, and his curls spilled across the white sheets. 

I breathed roughly, readying myself, and I grabbed the base of the cock. I moved forward on my knees, scooting across the sheets.

Then I froze. 

I looked back up into his eyes, with the tip of the cock just an inch from his hole. Foolish words poured from my lips before I could stop them. 

“Do we need a. . .” I started to ask. “Are you, you know . . . are you good --?”

I looked at him with what I knew was desperation on my face. Because I knew that I wasn’t actually about to press my real body inside of him, and that it was all just pretend, and that I didn’t need to ask.

But I wanted . . .God, I wanted to believe that it was real. I needed to believe that it was my real body, and that none of it was fake, and that I _needed_ to ask him before I pressed inside . . .

He understood immediately what I was trying to say. “I’m clean,” he said. “Don’t need to use a condom.” His palm rubbed slowly up my side, feeling the lines of my ribs, before trailing across the hair over my chest. “You can feel me,” he said, more softly. “I’m clean.”

I nodded and exhaled. “Right. Ok,” I whispered. I looked down at the cock still grasped in my hand, and I scooted forward again to try and line it up with his body. The angle was wrong. I nearly cried out in frustration.

I knew I was flushed red with embarrassment as I looked back up at him, beautiful and panting back on the soft sheets. “I can’t really. . . the angle isn’t right,” I admitted.

I expected him to huff and turn onto his hands and knees, but instead he grabbed the pillow under his head and shoved it beneath his hips so they were raised towards mine.

He looked at me with open, earnest eyes. His cock was still hard.

“John,” he said softly, when I still didn’t move. He took hold of my hand and brought it down to his mouth. He kissed the center of my palm, right over the cigarette burn etched into my skin from decades ago. All I could hear was the press of his lips against my skin, and the sound of my unsteady breath.

“Feel me,” he whispered, so softly on his still-swollen lips.

I nodded. In one swift movement, I looked down again at the cock pointing towards his hole. I guided it with a steady hand to his stretched entrance, tracing the rim once around with the tip.

And then I pressed inside his body, until my hips touched his.

He groaned deeply as I carefully slid into his body, and we both froze the moment I was buried all the way inside him. My lips hovered over his, and our wide eyes latched on to each other’s gazes. There was a fizzle in the air, something crackling between our joined skin. His palms slowly traced up my spine, and I cupped his face in my hand, keeping myself fully buried inside him. The base of the cock pressed back against my own skin, and I shivered at the imaginary thought of the wet heat of his body against my sensitive, hard cock.

I gazed at him, and I watched the soft flicker of his grey eyes – shimmering the way the twilight fog reflected off the crystal surface of Wonder Lake each night. The way the fireflies could dance, carrying flecks of stars on their wings.

We were frozen, and I suddenly wanted to ask him if he understood that he was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. That it physically ached in my chest each time he somehow let me touch him with my hands. 

I wanted to travel through time, and sprint across the world, and find myself that night I spent weeping alone in the little kitchen at Canyonlands after the shower, thinking that everything I loved on earth was about to be torn clear out of my clutching hands. I wanted to gather that small boy into my arms on the cold floor, and stroke his golden hair, and tell him that one day he would have a gorgeous man stretched out beneath him, kissing his palm and asking to feel his body inside himself. That one day he would be seen, naked and unashamed, and he would have a cock between his legs, and someone would want to taste that cock with their own lips.

I wanted to tell that terrified boy that I loved him. And I wanted Sherlock to know that I hadn’t been able to love that boy at all until the day Sherlock took my face in his hands and said, “ _You are. I know. I know. Kiss me again._ ”

Sherlock kissed me before I could say any of those things. His lips were wet and desperate against my own, moaning across my tongue. I held him, and shivered as our chests brushed together, and then I lifted myself up onto shaking arms, and stared down at the place where my body joined with his. I ignored the black straps crisscrossed over my skin, and ignored the empty space where the base of the cock was pulling slightly away from my groin.

And I watched, holding my breath, as I slowly pulled my wet cock out of his body. I hovered with the tip barely tracing around his rim, then disappeared back into his ass, pressing deep inside of him with myself, stretching him open and filling him with me.

“Oh my god,” I whispered. I couldn’t look away from the sight of my cock pumping in and out of him, fucking into his stretched open body and sinking into his hole.

He gasped for breath below me.

“I’m fucking you. . .” I groaned. The words roared in my ears. “Jesus, I’m in you –"

I heard a whimper, and I tore my eyes away to see Sherlock throwing his head back on the sheets, gripping fistfuls of the fabric as a bead of sweat dripped down from his curls. He was shaking, and he wrapped his long legs around my lower back and pulled me closer into his body, shoving me deeper inside him.

“Fuck,” he breathed. He reached up and gripped the back of my neck with his hand. His wild eyes locked onto mine as I sunk into him again, causing his breath to hitch. “Christ. . . John –”

“God, you’re tight,” I groaned. My hips slapped against his as I pumped into him hard. Every press into his body rubbed the base of the cock against my own skin, thrumming with pleasure at the place where I was erect. I watched his tight, full balls shake with each thrust I pushed into his body, and his cock was leaking fat drops of clear liquid onto his belly. I fucked him faster, and he held onto me with desperate hands.

He lifted his head from the sheets to peer down over his chest towards his ass. His eyes grew wide as I thrust into him again. “You’re fucking huge,” he moaned. He pulled my head down and to the side to lick up my neck, and then gasped as I yanked a handful of his curls. Sweat dripped down my spine, pooling at the place where the leather strap cut across the low of my back.

He could barely speak as I pounded into him, growing more and more wild at the heat of his skin beneath mine. He bore down to fuck himself deeper on my cock, crying out with each thrust as the bed started to knock and shake against the walls.

“John,” he panted. “Christ. . .more –”

“ _Fuck_ ,” I groaned. I slammed my cock into him again and again, gasping at the wet slap of my skin against his. My body was flooding with heat, building and building at the place where I rubbed against the cock buried deep in his ass. “God, yeah. . . Oh my god. . .You’re so . . . shit—”

“Fuck me,” he begged. His voice was high and desperate. 

And suddenly, I realized that my fantasy had come true. All the long, lonely nights where I’d lain on my stomach in my bed, rolling my thighs so I was rubbing off against the empty, quiet sheets, telling myself I was pounding into the ass of another man below me, and that he was begging me, panting, filled tight with my own cock. . .

Sherlock’s nails scratched deep into my back. “John I’m . . . Christ, you’re –”

“Yeah,” I moaned into his ear. I gripped his curls and angled my hips so I was pumping deeper into his ass, harder than ever before. His body shook beneath me, and his entire spine jolted as I reached the deepest place inside him. 

“Take me,” I whispered, burning with my own daring. “Come on, take me –”

“Harder. . . Christ –”

I was gonna come. “Sherlock, you’re . . . Yes. . . _oh_. . .”

“Fuck, John. I’m going to –”

Suddenly a hot burst of liquid streamed across my chest. I looked down and saw that Sherlock was coming, without either one of us even touching his aching cock. He threw back his head on his neck and cried out, half groan and half wail, and the sight of him, stretched pale and lean beneath my body, fucked into coming by just the thrust of my own cock, sent my orgasm exploding through my body, hard enough that I felt myself dripping down my thigh and straight onto his own skin.

I buried my face in his neck as my entire body pulsed and shook, and I trembled at the wet pool of his come in the hot space between our skin. I told myself I was spilling into his tight body, that his hot, clenching ass was being filled by my own semen. That it would come spilling out of his ass, dripping out his stretched hole.

I clutched him to me and breathed in his skin until the last pulses of warmth fizzled through my fingertips and thighs. I gasped for breath, and started to move to pull myself out of him so I could collapse beside him on the sheets, when suddenly his huge hands were gripping my jaw, and pulling me down for a wet, open kiss. I moaned gratefully into his mouth – the warm taste of his tongue, and the soft caress of his lips. I was still buried inside him, even though I couldn’t feel it, and even though I wasn’t growing soft inside his skin. I was unnaturally hard, and his cock was limp and soft between our bodies, and still, he was holding me down on top of him so he could plant kisses on my mouth and softly sigh across my tongue.

It made my throat suddenly feel too hot and tight. 

I smoothed the wet curls back from his forehead and kissed him one last time on the corner of his mouth. His lips were swollen and warm – wet from my own tongue. I dragged my cheek against his own, and pressed my lips to the sliver of skin below his ear. He sighed beneath me, and it sent cooling shivers across my skin.

I couldn’t look down when I slowly pulled out of his body. If I saw myself still hard and erect, even though my orgasm had already washed through my body, I’d only be reminded that none of it had been real – that I hadn’t really felt the tight heat of Sherlock’s ass against my skin, and my semen wouldn’t drip down out of his hole, and it wasn’t my own skin that had thrust into his open body.

So I didn’t look down. I kept my eyes on his face as I sat back on my heels and loosened the straps around my waist, pretending that nothing my hands were doing was even real. I didn’t look as I collapsed onto my back on the mattress beside him, and lifted my thighs so I could pull the thing down off my body. It thudded obscenely when it dropped to the wood floor.

I didn’t look down to see myself naked without the cock bobbing out from my skin. I couldn’t bear to see how small I would look – how empty the space would seem.

Suddenly I needed to cover myself again, as if every star in the sky could see me naked through the cabin roof. The desperation burned in my blood so sharply that for a moment I couldn’t see clearly before my eyes. I moved to get up from the bed and search around on the floor for my boxers, when Sherlock’s arm was being thrust in front of my face, and I realized he was silently holding my boxers for me to put on.

Again, my throat tightened, and I didn’t even thank him as I grabbed them quickly from his hand. I stared at the ceiling as I guided them up and over my legs, desperate for this part to be over, so I could lie down beside him as if I’d simply pulled out of his body and then fallen into his arms, without having to pull leather straps off my legs, or cover forgotten parts of my own skin.

But his hand was in front of my face again, this time holding the normal, flaccid cock in his palm. It looked small and naked, nearly pathetic in his steady hand. I sucked in a breath and looked down at his face. He lifted his eyebrows in a silent question.

“ _You are_ ,” he had said to me, with my bearded face in his hands.

Our fingertips brushed when I took the cock from his hand, and somehow it felt like the most intimate thing we’d ever done – as if that touch of our fingers was sex in itself, a desperate promise and an answer called out in the middle of making love.

I slipped it back inside my boxers, and adjusted myself, before I finally let myself relax onto my back. The sheets beneath me were damp with sweat, and I could smell the musk of his semen in the air.

I took a deep breath, wondering what the hell I could possibly say, when Sherlock turned onto his side and rolled into my arms without a word. He draped his leg over my own and wrapped his arm tightly around my stomach, and then he pressed his thigh into the soft penis that was now cradled against my skin. 

I could feel his own flaccid cock where it pressed warmly into my hip. I suddenly realized that he had wanted to feel both of our soft cocks pressed between our bodies as we slept, and a new wave of emotion overwhelmed me in my chest. I wrapped my arms around him and pulled him close into my body, tucking my chin over his wild head of curls.

I wanted to tell him “ _thank you_ ”, just two fragile words whispered slowly into the dark. But I stopped them just before they passed through my lips. Normal men didn’t thank each other for having sex before they went to bed, I told myself. And I knew my voice would choke up embarrassingly on the words.

Instead I pressed a long kiss into his warm curls. He hummed softly against my chest as his palm stroked once up my side. His body was growing heavier, drifting away into sleep.

I thought of the brass key.

“Sherlock,” I whispered. A few seconds later he hummed under his breath. I could barely hear the sound of it over the combined breathing of our lungs.

I ran my fingers through his soft hair and took a few long minutes to gather courage. I thought of the afternoon I’d crouched out in the woods with my dad, holding a gun up to my eleven-year-old shoulder for the very first time.

“ _Now, Ranger,_ ” he’d said, whispering roughly into my ear. “ _Takes courage to aim and fire your first shot. But you’re gonna do it, you hear me?_ ”

I’d trembled with nerves and excitement where we crouched in the brush, and I closed one eye to aim the gun at the target he’d painted on the far away trunk.

“ _Steady now,_ ” he’d said, with his hand hovering over my shoulder.

I’d taken a deep breath, and remembered his instructions, and fired.

“ _Hot damn, Ranger!_ ” he’d yelled, bursting up and knocking me over with his arms. “ _Look at that! Gonna be bagging your first buck before you’re old enough to drive. Ain’t no other girls up here ever fired a perfect first shot!_ ”

And I’d burned with pride as I peered through the trees at the perfect bullet hole blasted in the center of the painted trunk.

“ _That’s courage now, Ranger,_ ” he’d said again, smiling at me.

I remembered the way he’d lifted his hand from my shoulder when we came back in view of the house, and the way he’d quickly taken the gun from my hands. “ _Now don’t be telling your momma I taught you to shoot, you hear?_ ” he’d said. “ _Less you want the shit kicked out of you, not a word._ ”

I blinked my eyes open to the familiar ceiling of my cabin. Sherlock’s breath was warm against my throat, and his curls tickled my cheek.

“Sherlock,” I said again into the silence. “There’s something I want to ask you.”

But when he didn’t answer, and his naked body melted heavily into mine, I realized that he’d been asleep long before I’d gotten myself to open my mouth.

My eyes glanced over to the bedside table in the dark, imagining the exact shape and feel of the key hidden in the back.

“Another day,” I muttered under my breath into his curls. 

And he snored against my chest, with his thigh pressing into my soft cock, when I eventually closed my eyes to the world, and quietly whispered, “Thank you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *fans self*
> 
> Please enjoy the fact that I wrote the entirety of that last scene sitting at my parents' kitchen table while I was visiting them for a weekend. I was sweating and angling my computer screen away while my mom baked me cookies. 
> 
> As always, I am truly humbled by the love being shown for this story. What started out as "ooh park rangers!" has grown into something far bigger than myself. To all of you who expressed appreciation for John's story over the course of Con weekend, I am grateful beyond words. Your comments and recs and kudos and art have me constantly walking around in a state of total awe, and it is 100% because of this community we all share that I keep feeling inspired to sit down and let John tell more of his story.
> 
> Also just a heads up that I did not have any fabulous betas / readers for this chapter, so any inaccuracies are completely my own. I tried my best to apply the wisdom they shared with me previously to these latest chapters, as well as delve into the research from my medical beta (and my own experiences) to make sure John's first strap on experience read as accurately as possible. If anything jumps out at you, though, you know how to contact me! It's all in my profile.
> 
> I can't wait to hear from you all, because your comments make me feel like Lugnut in the middle of one of John's famous belly rubs! Be well, and go outdoors, and stay hydrated, and I'll see you next chapter :)
> 
> Next time: It's 1992, and Sherlock and John are dealing with the emotional aftermath of their canoe ride. Can one more hike finally bring them the healing they need? And what special little surprise will Sherlock find out in the vast tundra? WILL THEY KISS?! Stay tuned.


	13. August 1992

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bluegrass: Listen to Chris Thile and Aoife O'Donovan sing "Here and Heaven" [HERE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxzgkFlgIYg/).
> 
> Not even really bluegrass but it's still a great song for this chapter so who cares: Listen to "Standing On the Moon" by Lera Lynn [HERE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eze74encNRE/).
> 
> Sarah Jarosz: Listen to "Build Me Up From Bones" [HERE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow9pht81SWY/).
> 
> *Now, that Sarah song is THE SONG of this fic for me. I've been waiting and waiting to finally use it here, for this specific chapter and ending scene. Do yourself a favor and listen to it/ look up the lyrics, and cry with me over its Johnlock perfection. I've copied the lyrics in the end notes because they're JUST. THAT. PERFECT.
> 
> As always, thank you for reading, and I truly hope you enjoy :)

August 1992

 

“I took Sherlock out on Wonder in the canoe the other day,” I said. 

We were standing shoulder to shoulder on the overlook deck at Eielson; Molly had been developing a sled dog-focused Kantishna Experience talk, and Eielson was one of the stops along the route where the visitors could get out for an hour for lunch at the picnic tables. The bright, warm sun glittered across the field of flowers rolling before us, and it glinted off the sunglasses and hiking poles of visitors down along the Nature Walk trail below. There was a hum of rushing people and families at our backs, and the distant growl of busses, and beside me, Molly took another bite of her peanut butter and jelly sandwich before turning to look my way.

She shielded the bright sun from her eyes with her hand. “How did it go?” she asked softly. I could hear the curiosity hiding behind her calm voice.

I couldn’t stop the quick smile from flashing across my mouth. I bent my head over my arms resting forward on the handrail. 

“Good,” I said, wishing I had the ability to choose better words. I kept speaking down at my hands. “It was . . . yeah. We finally got to say some things, I think. Things about . . . last year.” I coughed. “And, you know, the weather was nice.”

She suddenly laughed beside me. “The weather was nice?” 

I grimaced at myself as she bumped her shoulder hard against mine. “Jesus, John, I didn’t think you were eighty-five years old, yet. Not for another two or three years at least.” She shook her head out over the tundra and laughed again as she spoke under her breath. “’The weather was nice.’ Honestly, he goes and takes the love of his life out on a canoe to try to win him back, and the only thing he has to say about it is that the fucking weather was nice.”

I looked quickly over my shoulder as she spoke, suddenly painfully aware that any one of the visitors surrounding us could hear. Hear what, I wasn’t exactly sure. That I was a gay Park Ranger, or that I’d messed up the only perfect relationship I ever had.

That I apparently had a love of my life. And that he was a _he_.

“No one’s listening,” she said quietly beside me, following my gaze over our backs.

I blushed and cleared my throat as we turned to look back down at the trail. “Sorry,” I said. “Just . . . it’s not really ok, you know? If anyone found out, one of our bosses –”

“I know. I’m sorry.” She put her hand quickly on my wrist. “I wasn’t thinking.”

I looked over at her and reached up to smooth her hair down the back of her head, then leaned across to press a quick kiss to the side of her head, something I never would have done in public before in a million years, but which now, after everything that season, felt as right as the bright, full sun and clouds shining above our heads.

That deep, hidden, ironic part of myself laughed that the Park Service finding out who I slept with was far from the worst thing they could find out about me if they ever decided to really look. I reached down with one hand and gently pulled up on the buckle of my belt as if I was adjusting my uniform pants, feeling a calm assurance at the heavy press of the cock inside my boxers against my skin.

She smiled and reached up with her hand to massage the back of my neck. “So. . .” she started again. “This. . . mysterious canoe ride. . . with this mysterious person. . . What actually happened?”

I knew that she wasn’t going to let it go, and a part of me brightened that she actually wanted to hear, and that I could finally tell her.

I lowered my voice just in case as I spoke. “I told him about the key I had made for him for my winter cabin,” I said. “That I still had it in a drawer.” My heart started to race. “He asked me not to throw it away.”

Her eyebrows rose, and I could see the warmth glittering in the corners of her eyes. “So. . .does that mean . . you’re back together. . .?”

“No, no, nothing like that,” I said quickly. Immediately I thought back to those final moments out on the canoe – the way his warm palm had rested on the back of my neck as the water lapped gently at the still sides of the little boat. The way his breath had shaken when I leaned back slightly into his embrace.

“We, uh. . .” I started again. I glanced quickly down at her, and her eyes were a full, deep brown. “It sounds stupid, but . . we hugged. After we docked back on the shore and climbed out. We hugged for a long time, actually. Just . . . stood there. And didn’t say anything.” 

I heard her breath hitch next to me, and I looked down just in time to see her quickly blinking a tear out of her eye. She huffed a laugh at herself when she saw that I’d seen. “Fuck, I don’t know what you’ve done to me to make me cry about a hug,” she said. “We’re too old for you to be making me emotional over a hug.”

I laughed along with her under my breath, and then found my own throat embarrassingly tight. “It. . . it was a lot more than a hug,” I said quietly. “Not physically,” I added, when her eyes widened. “Just. . . I held him for a long time. . by the water. I felt him crying, a bit.” I cleared my choked-up throat until I knew I could speak again without my voice sounding too rough. “It meant a lot,” I finally said.

Molly was just opening her mouth to respond, her soft gaze fixed on my face, when a woman came out of nowhere, bursting into the small space between us.

“Oh, I’m so sorry to barge in, but can I just ask one of you where – Oh, you’re pregnant! Look at you, dear, how far along are you?”

My heart started to race at the sudden change in mood. A wild terror gripped me that secret words would still come pouring out of my lips – that I would tell this woman in her bright yellow Alaska Railroad pullover that I wanted to ask the Park’s wolf researcher if he would once again sleep in my bed. That I wiped away one of his tears with my thumb beside the lake she was on her way to visit, and that I stood there holding his hand as the sun finally slipped below the distant purple peaks she’d seen photographed on postcards back in the gift shop.

Molly flashed me a quick glance before putting on her visitor-face. I saw her cheeks blush red, and her hand awkwardly rested over her belly curving beneath her uniform shirt. 

“Yeah, um, coming on six months I think,” she said. 

The woman cried out and threw her hands up in the air, nearly knocking the sunglasses off her head as she glanced between us both. “Goodness me, what a beautiful family. A little Ranger on the way!” She looked back at Molly with shining eyes. “Boy or girl?”

“We don’t know yet,” Molly said, at the same exact time I blurted out, “I’m not the father.”

The woman paused for a second before turning slightly pink in her cheeks. She put a hand on my arm and squeezed. “Oh, I’ve gone and put my foot in my mouth again,” she said, laughing at herself. I suddenly realized that there was a teenage boy and girl standing off behind her, both of them rolling their eyes and trying to look away. 

I started to fiddle with one of the patches on my shirt, then threw my hand back down by my side when I caught Molly’s joking glare. “Oh, uh, totally fine,” I said. “Easy mistake to make. I’m far better looking than the Ranger she’s actually with.”

The woman laughed too loudly as Molly rolled her eyes at me behind her back. “Well, I was still right about the Ranger family then!” she said. Without warning, she reached out and put a hand right on Molly’s stomach.

“Well, my vote’s for a boy, I’d say. Way you’re already carrying so low. Boys always give their mother’s grief being low.”

She grabbed my arm again and gave me a hard pat. “Bet you gave your mother a hell of a lot of trouble on your way out!” she said as she winked.

I nearly threw back my head and laughed at the sky. Immediately, the thought flashed through my mind that I couldn’t wait to tell the story of this conversation to Sherlock – that he was the only person on earth who could find it hilarious that I, of all people, found myself trapped in this situation.

And suddenly, the small, simple fact that I actually _could_ tell him about it brought a rushing tightness to my chest. 

I thought of the countless times over the past year, all those months in the Grand Canyon, and earlier that season, when I’d gotten in my truck or on my horse and couldn’t wait to get back to tell Sherlock about my day. And I thought of all the equally countless times when I would suddenly remember, seconds later, that he wouldn’t be there to hear it. And the pain of it would surprise me with its sharpness every time.

But there, standing on the Eielson Visitor deck with this beaming woman rubbing Molly’s stomach, and saying that I must have been a terrible boy in my poor mother’s womb, and thinking that I had been the one to have sex with Ranger Hooper, I was breathless and giddy throughout my entire chest that this time, when I stepped in my truck and thought, “ _I’ll tell Sherlock about this tonight_ ,” I wouldn’t have to remember, seconds later, that he wouldn’t be around to hear it. That it might not be that night, or in my own cabin, or side by side in my bed, but he would eventually hear it all the same. And his laugh would join mine.

I blinked out of my thoughts to realize that the woman was long gone, and Molly was standing beside me once again eating the rest of her sandwich, letting me stare off into the distance deep in thought.

“Sorry,” I said quickly. I had no idea how long I’d stood there without speaking.

She smiled. “Thought we’d lost you there.”

I looked over my shoulder and spotted the woman dragging the two teens behind her back into the Visitor Center, with a huge smile on her face and a fanny pack bulging with folded up Park maps. I said a quick prayer for whatever poor Interp person on desk duty got to answer her questions for the next two hours, then turned so I was standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Molly again and folded my hands over the rail. 

“Sorry, I . . . I mean, what the fuck just happened? Do people just . . . do that to you now?”

Molly covered her mouth with her hand to hide her bark of laughter. “God, you have no idea. I’ve thought of changing the sign back at the kennels to ‘Sled Dog Demonstration at 2pm Daily, followed by a pregnant Ranger at 3!’”

I laughed. “And Greg’s seen this happen, yeah? What does he say?”

Molly rolled her eyes. “He’s even worse than you just standing there looking like a deer in headlights. My wonderful beloved likes to pretend he’s only just now noticed that I’m pregnant. Looks down at my stomach all bug-eyed after a visitor asks how far along I am like ‘Christ, Molls, you never said . . . Great Scott I’m gonna be a dad!’ And the fucker picks me up and kisses me in front of them like he just found out all over again.”

I was laughing almost too hard to speak. “You’re joking –”

“I’m one-hundred-percent not. And because he’s got that fucking accent everyone just thinks he’s being sweet and adorable instead of a great big idiot.” She looked down at her stomach. “Honestly, who wouldn’t notice?”

“Oh my God,” I choked out, “That’s priceless.” And then the two of us were giggling leaning over the railing, trying to hold it in since we were both technically still on duty. Her eyes sparkled as she looked at me, as if there was nothing on earth she’d rather be doing than laugh by my side, and a sudden memory, long forgotten, flashed through my mind carried along on the floral breeze.

That summer night with James, the first season we met, sitting side by side on the top of one of Death Valley’s lookout points. The stars had been pouring down to kiss the flat surface of the distant earth, silver meeting black over wide pools of golden sand.

I remembered, seeing that twinkle in Molly’s eyes, how James had made a joke - one which made me try not to laugh too hard beside him, and he’d looked at me, suddenly serious, until I met his gaze.

“ _You know, you don’t ever laugh much,_ ” he’d said.

I’d shrugged, grateful the night sky could hide my blush. “ _Guess it’s not my personality, I guess. . ._ ”

“ _No, see, that’s just it. You wanna laugh all the time. Always thinking of funny shit to say in your head. And then you hold it back, like no one ever sat down and taught you how to actually laugh. You know, just let loose and do it._ ”

I’d thought of laughing that one afternoon with my dad, running across our neighbor’s field to try and catch their loose cat. The way he’d leaned over with his hands on his knees as I slipped in a pool of mud and went sliding forward on my stomach, and I’d been laughing too hard to care that the mud made my shirt cling to the budding curves of my young chest. How he’d wiped happy tears from the corners of his eyes, something I’d never seen him do before, as he watched me slip again trying to leap and pounce on the cat hiding in the overgrown grass.

Before I could say anything back, James had reached over and put his warm palm on my shoulder. I’d leaned into his touch. “ _See now, looks like I gotta show you how,_ ” he’d said, laughing, and I’d felt like I was sixteen again, young and free and sitting in that warm field. . .

“ _I like your laugh, John. It’s . . . well it’s sort of bubbling isn’t it? Reminds me of my sister’s laugh before she passed. Totally carefree._ ”

And I wondered, standing there with Molly’s soft chuckle still in the air, if James would think that my laugh still sounded exactly the same as her own beside me.

If Sherlock had ever thought the same thing whenever he made me laugh in those early days the year before.

“John?”

Molly was looking at me with a slight frown on her face, sandwich halted halfway to her lips.

“Sorry,” I said quickly. I took a deep breath. “Just . . . thinking about the rest of the other day,” I said, only partly a lie.

She raised her eyebrows around a full mouthful for me to continue. 

“It’s not interesting at all, it’s just . . . we talked, actually. On the drive back. I told him all about the Canyon over the winter, and he told me what he’d done.” I looked down at my hands and cleared my throat. “We never really . . . did that, before. Just talked like that.”

Molly frowned around her bite. “What did you talk about then? You spent every second together.”

I laughed harshly under my breath. “God, nothing, it seems like now. I mean, sometimes we did, about our lives and all that, but mostly it was just . . . wolves. Teasing each other. All the ways I drove at the incorrect speed or made dinner the wrong way.” I lowered my voice a bit. “Sex. . .”

Molly quickly shook her head. “I can’t think about the equivalent of my big brother having sex,” she said with her eyes closed. “I mean, great, that’s great, but don’t ever mention it to me again.”

I laughed, grateful for the break in my clouded thoughts, and roughed up her hair. Then I stole the sandwich from her hand to take the last bite. “Well if I’m so good at convincing people I’m the father of this child,” I said with my mouth full, “Maybe you should think about it. Might be you’ve been missing out. Plus, now I’m available.”

She shuddered, and I laughed harder. “I’m going to vomit up this sandwich if you mention having intercourse one more time,” she hissed under her breath. “And I’ve already vomited three times today.”

I glanced down at her full stomach. “Oh, and like I don’t have to think about you and Greg every time I look down?”

She shook her head quickly. “Immaculate conception,” she said, fake seriously. “Greg’s only ever made it to second base.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Do I even wanna know ---?”

“Frenching,” she whispered dramatically, with her hand in front of her mouth. “One time I even took off my shirt –”

“Nope, nope, nope,” I cut in. Her shoulders shook with her quiet laughter as I drew my arm around her and pulled her into my side. Behind us I heard her bus driver make the announcement to re-board. 

“You’ll tell me what happens?” she asked quietly. The surge of warmth I felt for her was nearly overwhelming, nothing like anything I’d ever felt for Harry, even on those precious days when we were too young to understand, and she would let me call myself her brother where we played pretend out in the dirt.

“Deal, kid,” I said. Her arm wrapped tightly around my back. When I went to pull away, she held me even closer. 

“I told you you didn’t throw anything away,” she whispered into my chest. I breathed out hard and pressed my cheek into her hair. 

The curve of her stomach felt odd pressed up against mine – but it was warm, and soft, in a way I’d never felt before. I thought of the only time Harry had hugged me back when she was pregnant – a few days after we came back from the ultrasound that ended in her and my mom screaming in the parking lot by our breaking-down truck. She’d crept up into my attic, the first time she ever even climbed up the ladder, and cried, leaning over her huge stomach, while I put my arm around her shoulders.

“ _Promise me you won’t ever get like this,_ ” she’d whispered. “ _You gotta promise me._ ”

I’d promised her silently, with her tears on my shoulder, and I’d wondered if she could feel through my t-shirt that my chest was tied down.

After a quiet moment, Molly pulled back and moved to start walking over to her waiting bus.

“Besides, John,” she said back over her shoulder, flipping her long hair as she jammed her Ranger hat back down over her head, “You won’t be available for long.” She winked.

And as I stood there, and watched her disappear into the swarming crowd, I immediately wanted to step forward and call out that she was wrong – that she had no idea what she was talking about, and that she shouldn’t be ridiculous, and that we both knew she was just trying to make me feel less like a failure.

But that flame. . . that flame started to crackle inside my chest again. It burned through the very marrow in my bones and flooded through my hands. It warmed my throat instead of closing it up with ice, and it made my vision sharpen until it was nothing but clear.

It made the huge, soft sky floating endlessly above my head look like the brilliant surface of the still waters – the very color of Sherlock’s eyes when I’d wiped away his tear on the Wonder Lake shore. Right after he’d told me, half looking at his feet and with my hand in his, that he missed me.

And then I’d told him, gripping his fingers and with the sky shining through his curls, that every night, in my bed in the empty dark, I missed him too.

 

\--

 

“Watson! The hell you doing way out here?”

I stopped with one foot up in my truck and turned around to face Nick, jogging towards me with one hand up over his head to wave me down.

I put my hands on my belt loops and leaned against my open truck door to wait. Even after all this time, after all the decades, I still had to remind myself not to put just one hand on my hip when I stood still waiting for something – the same way I’d been standing that day Molly asked me if I grew up with a bunch of sisters. The thought flashed through my mind that Sherlock would have taken one look at my hand hesitating by my hip and given me a knowing smile. That he would have seen me, and understood me, and not looked away.

“Nick,” I said, smiling, when he got closer.

He raised his forearm to wipe some sweat from his brow, then swatted at a mosquito.

“Didn’t expect to see you out East ever again now that –”

He trailed off, eyes wide, as he realized his mistake. I wondered how he had been planning on finishing that sentence. “ _Now that your dog is dead. . ._ ” or “ _Now that you don’t have any reason on earth to leave Toklat. . ._ ” or “ _Now that you’re not following Sherlock Holmes around the Park anymore. . ._ ”

“Shit, sorry, Watson –” Nick was starting to say.

I smiled softly at him. “All good, Nick. I haven’t been out here much since. . that, anyways. Just visiting Molly.”

Nick’s face immediately changed from deep regret to a knowing smile. “Ah, good ol’ Hooper.” He stroked his beard and looked off at the tops of the trees. “And how’s her man?”

The question was fragile, and it reminded me of the odd, shocked looks I’d gotten for the next two weeks after it became known that Molly and Greg were together last year. Confusion, mixed with pity, mixed with outrage on my part that it hadn’t been me kissing Molly Hooper after the staff meeting. I hadn’t had the energy to correct them all. I was too busy thinking about long legs in a grey suit. . .

“Greg’s good,” I said. “’Right chuffed’ as he would probably say – getting ready to be a dad and all that.”

Nick hummed and nodded. “Man, seeing the two of them. . makes me want to get a move on and finally have a kid of my own, you know? You don’t have any kids either, do you Watson?”

I shook my head, and then wanted to laugh since my brain immediately thought of Lugnut the day he first jumped up into my arms. “No, no I don’t,” I said. “Not really for me.”

Nick was silent for a moment, stroking the straining front of his uniform buttons as he puffed up his chest. “You know, actually, I can’t say I disagree. The crying and the poop.” He shuddered dramatically. Once again, I was in awe that Nick could manage to create a conversation about literally anything.

I huffed a small laugh then nodded towards my truck. “Well. . .”

“Oh, right, reason for me flagging you down here,” he said. He put his hands on his hips, all business again. “Been some personnel changes over at the Backcountry Office,” he said. “Drama you sure as hell don’t even want to know about.” He waved his hand and shook his head, rolling his eyes. It looked so natural on his face – the movement – and I wondered if that’s what I finally looked like too whenever I rolled mine – if I did it the same way.

“Thing that relates to you is,” he went on, “Got some patrols that can’t get covered now. Don’t have enough staff. Don’t have even enough people to fully cover the permit trainings, Neil says to me at least. I know you have your day off coming up, but . . .any chance you could use it to cover a day-long patrol out through Unit Thirty? Along Tributary Creek? You know, just the usual. Been some cub sightings along the west bank of the river lately, but no mother in sight. Just need an extra pair of eyes until they get themselves sorted in the office.”

He paused, waiting for my reaction to being told my weekend was essentially being taken away. 

I suddenly thought of Sherlock, hiking along beside me with his lone bear spray can in his hand, matching his long steps to mine.

“Don’t worry about it, Nick,” I said. “I can cover it, easy.”

He breathed out a dramatic sigh of relief. “You’re a saint, Watson,” he said. “You’re just about the only Ranger here I can trust to do a good backcountry patrol anymore. I’ll have the forms sent to you – probably have our Hannah tape them to your door once I get them together. She’s a sweetheart, you know.”

I laughed under my breath and nodded. “That, she is.”

I expected Nick to thank me one more time with a wave of his hand before walking away, but instead he stayed there, standing a little bit too close to me by my truck. He looked into my eyes for a long, awkward moment, and I started to prickle along the back of my neck under his gaze.

“You know, John,” he finally said, in a soft voice I’d never quite heard him use before, “I’ve never really told you how goddamn grateful I am to have you around.”

When I opened my mouth to cut him off he grinned and held up a hand to stop me. “I know, I know, you’re as humble as a pile of shit, but, I need you to know, because I don’t think anyone’s ever said it. We’d be lost without you here. Take you for granted, I reckon. But, out of anyone here, you were born to do this. Probably came out of the womb with the Ranger hat already on. We’re lucky sons of bitches to have you around, John. Lucky as all hell.”

I thought of buttoning up my uniform shirt for the very first time over my newly flat chest, the fierce surge of pride, the way that the heavens had opened up and sighed above my head, and shone down on me with fresh air, and guided my nervous, shaking hands. The brand new, gleaming nametag that said “Ranger John Watson” – etched into metal like it could never be erased again from the earth.

“Gee, Nick. . .” I tried to say. To my horror, I felt a tear suddenly slip free from my eye and slide down my cheek. I quickly wiped it away, but I knew Nick had seen.

He didn’t point it out, but just reached out and put his hand on my upper arm, giving me a good squeeze and a nod. “You’re a fine man, John. And a damn fine Ranger. Should’ve told you that years ago, I see now,” he said. And before I could clear my throat to say anything more back, he was already walking away, whistling a little tune and wildly waving at a group of Kennel Rangers coming out of the offices from their lunch.

“How’s the ol’ dogs?” I heard him yell. They started calling something back.

I hopped up in my truck before anyone else could see me standing there, wiping my wet eyes. For a moment, it panged deeply in my chest that I couldn’t run over and tell Lugnut all about what had just happened – hold his soft, warm fur in my hands, and know that he would lick the trail of salt off my cheek.

“ _I did it, old man,_ ” I would say to him, as if I had somehow just accomplished something. “Looks like I finally did it.”

Then I remembered that I would get to go ask Sherlock if he would come with me on my patrol when I got back. The flame flared up to life, fizzling the wetness in my throat. I yanked the truck into gear and pulled out of the lot, desperate to get to Toklat as fast as possible. The rolling, rocky hills and seas of trees zoomed by, waving in the breeze like giant meadows filled with rippling, green water. I put in my favorite bluegrass tape – the old Jimmy Martin one that was starting to wear out. The banjo swirled out the rolled-down windows on the fresh breeze.

I thought of the first time my dad looked down at me with pride burning in the back of his eyes. “ _Oughta start calling you Ranger,_ ” he’d said. “ _Way you found that damn cat faster than any of us could have in a whole damn year._ ”

I wondered what Sherlock’s face would look like after I asked him to go with me on the Patrol – how his eyes would shine as he’d look down at me from his little porch and say, perhaps softly, perhaps with a warm smile, “ _Of course, Ranger_ ,” and then I would tell him all about the woman who thought I was about to become a dad.

 

\--

 

That wasn’t how it happened.

Between my work shifts and Sherlock’s research with his team, I didn’t see him after that for another two days. I always kept that lookout in the corner of my eye, scanning each horizon line for a glimpse of a head of curls, but more often than not the horizon lines I glimpsed were empty of anybody else – dotted with antlers gracefully roaming across the grass, or the tops of trees piercing the sky, or a single white cloud dissolving into mist as it passed through the tallest peak. 

Before I knew it, it was late evening, the night before I was due to cover that backcountry patrol. I sat at my kitchen table in front of a half-drunk cup of mint tea, turning the chipped ceramic mug in my hands. 

The skin of my hands had never really forgotten the feeling of Sherlock Holmes’ lips – those few times when I would wake up to the sensation of wet warmth on the back of my hand, tracing the tendons and veins, and Sherlock would be kissing it like it was the most precious thing on earth. Kissing my calluses and the faint scars on my skin, and tracing his lips across the hair on the back of my hands. Kissing the center of my palm, my too small and too thin fingers.

A soft knock on my front door startled me from my thoughts, and I stood up with an odd racing beat in my heart, wordlessly hoping as I swung open the door.

Hannah stepped back like she was surprised I was home. “Oh, John!” She pushed her hair back behind her ears. “I didn’t think you were home – with the lights off – I was just here to –” 

She lifted the packet of papers in her hand with a shrug, the waterproof booklet to fill out on my patrol the next day. I quickly glanced back into my dark cabin; I hadn’t even realized I’d been sitting there without any lights on. The late sun was just starting to slip below the distant peaks, even though it was past ten at night, and the cool wind rose goosebumps on my bare forearms. 

“Oh right, thanks,” I said, reaching to take the papers. For some reason I added again, “Thank you.”

“Of course,” she said. She stared down at my hand gripping the folded papers, and suddenly the air between us turned heavy and stale. There was a sad twist to her mouth, one that looked embarrassed. I felt that it was critical that I say something in that moment – that I tell her that I didn’t hold anything from before against her, or that I appreciated what she said after Lugnut, or something.

I cleared my throat and traced one of the wavy locks of her hair with my eyes. It was the exact same color that mine had been all those year ago, in a different universe, and a different life, before it ended up shaved off into a pile in the attic, and it grew back again a much dirtier blonde a week later. 

“So,” I started, wincing when my voice sounded too loud. “How are –”

“Hannah! Come on!”

She’d been looking at me as I started to speak, eyes wide and fixed on my face, but we both jumped and turned at the sound of the voice, as if we’d been caught out doing something we shouldn’t have been doing. She waved at Jess and yelled that she’d just be a minute, then turned back to me, the odd nerves that had been clouding her face before now gone.

“Look, a bunch of us are going up to Wonder for the evening. Gonna carpool in the vans and have a campfire by the lake. Jess said people brought beers and s’mores. You wanna come?”

Her smile lit up her face. I marveled at the fact that someone could be so persistently positive in my presence. It reminded me of James – the way he used to ask me to come with him again and again, and half the time I would say no, and half of those times he would say screw everyone else and come be with me instead.

For one mad, pounding second, I thought of saying yes. I wanted to know, with a sudden desperation, just what it was that kept my feet rooted to the doorstep of my cabin, when I knew that a bunch of other Rangers, people I’d worked and lived with for years, would be spending time together tonight by a gorgeous lake. I wondered what would happen if I just hopped along in that van, and listened to Jess, Hannah, Chris, Nathan, and all the rest of them talk about the latest Park gossip, or share visitor stories, or moments from their latest hikes. I wondered what all of their faces would look like when I showed up, stepping towards the campfire from out of the shadows. If they would be shocked, or smile.

If they would care.

I realized I was opening my mouth to say “yes.” The beginnings of the word were forming on my tongue. 

Then I saw it.

Saw _him_ , rather. Far away from the cluster of Toklat cabins and the winding forest of trees, from the perch of my cabin porch, I saw a flicker of small fire out in the middle of the dry riverbed. It looked like a flame from a lighter, and it waved through the air, flickering like a tiny firefly, until it reached the shadow of a head topped with curls blowing in the breeze.

“John?”

I tore my eyes away from Sherlock’s long legs balancing on the uneven rocks. I could barely make out the details of his body from that distance– almost like my mind was filling in the blanks for me through the haze of the late sun and the shadows of the trees.

“Sorry, Hannah, I – Well, thanks for inviting me,” I said.

I expected her face to fall, but instead it just looked resigned. She’d known I wouldn’t say yes.

“Right, I’ll let them all know you say hello,” she said, forcing a smile. 

“Thank you, really –”

“I knew it was a longshot,” she said, already turning to jog down the porch stairs. She called back, pointing to the packet of reports in my hand, “Good luck with that! Don’t get eaten!”

I raised my hand silently in goodbye and nodded, waiting until she was far out of sight walking down to the gravel parking lot with Jess. The second I knew they could no longer see me, I threw the papers inside, slammed the door, and started speed-walking down the slope in the other direction towards the riverbed, where a small curl of smoke was rising up from the silhouette of Sherlock’s back. 

He was still smoking by the time I walked up to him on the bed of rocks, calmly holding the cigarette in his hand and not even hesitating or turning around when he heard me approach. 

I stood by his side, a careful two feet in between us. I didn’t look sideways at his face, but instead followed his gaze out towards the distant peaks. The last embers of sunlight were settling over the riverbed, winding through the rocks like a babbling creek of soft gold. The breeze when it blew caused the river rock to tremble, crackling against each other like a sigh from the earth.

“Seriously?” I finally said. I didn’t even gesture to the cigarette.

He raised it to his lips and took a long drag before he answered. I could taste the smoke in the air.

“You’re going to ask me to accompany you on that extra backcountry patrol tomorrow – the one you’re giving up your day off for, since you can’t bear the thought of letting anyone down.”

I grinned in the corner of my mouth so he couldn’t see. “Greg or Nick told you that,” I said, not a question.

He exhaled loudly. “He did not, in fact. I do have other ways of knowing information.”

“What, you just figured all that out without even looking at me right now? Read my mind?”

He scoffed and flicked the ash out onto the river rock with a long finger. I resisted the urge to immediately scoop up the sullied rock in my hands. “That would be ridiculous,” he said calmly. He took a slow breath. “Max told me.”

I barked out a laugh. “Right, of course.” When he didn’t say anything back, and the silence stretched on, I went on, “You know that’s not the reason why I’m down here.”

He hummed. “It’s not the _excuse_ for why you’re down here, but it is the reason.”

I finally rolled my eyes and turned to face him. His gaze flickered over to me out of the corner of his eye, and the expression on his face was calm and warm. He quickly looked up and down my body, lingering on my face. He raised one eyebrow as he took another long drag, and the wind pushed a curl across his forehead. 

“You seriously can’t smoke here,” I said, trying to sound stern. “I could literally lose my job for not stopping you right now.”

He grinned around his next exhale. “Then stop me.” 

My fingers twitched, but I didn’t move. He smirked when he watched my eyes follow the cigarette back to his lips. “Nobody cares, anyways,” he said. “They’re all down at that dreadful campfire for the evening. You and I and two of the trail maintenance people are the only ones still here. Greg’s having sex or making lists of baby supplies to buy out East.”

I shook my head. “You’re unbelievable,” I muttered. The breeze picked up, carrying a thick scent of smoke towards my face. I was suddenly struck breathless by how good it felt to tease him – to stand there bickering back and forth, and hearing his sharp, quick words, and all of it with the memory of his arms wrapped around me on the lake shore still fresh in my mind, as if my skin could still feel the strength of his embrace days later.

I heard him smirk. “I allow myself to have one a season,” he said calmly, as if he wasn’t talking about something that could burn down a National Park. “That gum can be truly atrocious. I consider it a special treat for having to put up with all this camping nonsense every year.”

“Oh right, blame wolves for not hanging around in cities where it’s more convenient to track them down,” I said back. Then I frowned, “Hold on, how is that possible? I never once smelled it on you all last year.” The unspoken understanding that I had been with him nearly all day, every day of the last season hung heavily between us, but instead of freezing the air, it felt warm.

He inhaled again and exhaled his smoke up towards the sky. He cleared his throat before he spoke. “I did,” he said, so quietly I could barely hear. “After.”

Realization flooded my bones, and I drew in a quick breath. I thought of myself, standing in the middle of my cabin with my head in my hands, feeling sick to my stomach, and Sherlock had been left out alone in the middle of the tundra, allowing himself his one cigarette while he watched the empty path where I had walked away.

Or, at least, that’s how I imagined it. Needed to imagine it – that he had stared at the place where I had disappeared instead of immediately looking away.

“Why tonight, then?” I asked softly. I realized I was afraid to hear his answer, and I felt a surge of pride in my chest that I still asked him the question.

He smiled sadly at the ground, then reached into his pocket and pulled out a little box. He opened it and stubbed out the cigarette on some gravel inside, before closing it and taking his time to put it away. He took a long breath, and the last ray of sunlight suddenly slipped below the peaks, bathing the world in cool purple and grey.

“I was supposed to go back to London tonight,” he finally said. “Flight was out of Fairbanks twenty-five minutes ago. Red-eye layover in New York before landing at Heathrow tomorrow, where my brother’s people would pick me up and drive me straight to a conference in Cambridge where I’m one of the paid speakers. Considering I’m not officially employed by the NPS this season, I knew I could leave whenever I wanted. Figured I’d have enough data by now to finish up last year’s research.”

I couldn’t speak. I had a sudden, terrible fear that he would look at me, say cheers, and then walk away to still somehow catch that flight that left thirty minutes ago. That this lone cigarette on the dry riverbed at sunset, with his joking and his teases, was also somehow a goodbye.

We both knew that he wasn’t back in Denali that season just to finish up his research.

“Why didn’t you take it?” I finally whispered. 

I traced the side of his face with my eyes while I waited for his answer– the sharp line of his jaw I’d tasted and kissed, and his eyelashes glittering in the last golden light from the sun. I realized it was probably what he’d looked like that evening all those months ago, when I couldn’t turn around to look, and when he’d stood behind me and said, “ _John,_ ” and “ _I’m glad you came back._ ”

He finally looked at me, and his eyes were deep and clear. “I told you - Max told me you were covering an extra patrol tomorrow,” he said. His face was soft with an emotion I couldn’t name. It looked like his face that morning he’d handed me the cock in the dawn air of the tent. Or that evening sitting on the roof of my truck watching the caribou cross the Road, when I’d first reached out to take his hand so that the entire evening sky could see.

I crossed my arms over my chest against the cold and softly smiled at the gathering mist. “When you break into my cabin tomorrow morning, because I know you’re going to do that no matter what I say, it’s your job to get the coffee and oatmeal started,” I said.

He looked down at me with knowing eyes, and suddenly I was back in that canoe with his hand on the back of my neck. I was back in my truck, that first day last summer that I ever drove him out to a kill site, and he was curled up in my passenger seat with the buttons of his uniform shirt straining, telling me, in a deep, calm voice, “ _I know your name._ ”

“Do you still take your oats with a revolting scoop of peanut butter in it?” he asked me.

I smirked and watched a lone hawk soar upwards out of the evening fog. Its cry sent a shiver down my spine, and it caused a nearby hare to sprint away through the long grass on the bank of the riverbed, scrambling up the loose scree.

I chuckled once through my nose. “I sure do.”

He huffed beside me, then bent down to pick up the rock he’d dropped ash on earlier, holding it up for me to see before dramatically pocketing it in his pants. “So you don’t lose any sleep over me disregarding your ridiculous ‘leave no trace’ rule,” he said, then he turned to walk back up the slope to the cabins.

Words poured out of me before I could even think to stop them. “A few months ago, when you first found me down here,” I said to his back. I ignored the shaking in my hands. He looked back over his shoulder when I paused, then raised his eyebrows in acknowledgement for me to continue.

“I . . . I couldn’t even look at you,” I said.

He nodded. “You were angry, which you had every right to be.”

I shook my head and spoke slowly, forming the ideas even as the words were leaving my mouth. “I wasn’t . . . angry. Not that, I don’t think. I just . . . I wasn’t ready,” I finally said. “I couldn’t tell you, then, what I actually wanted to say.”

His beautiful eyes stared longingly into my face through the evening haze. “Will you tell me now?” he asked.

I wanted to rub my hand across my mouth, but I kept it down at my side. I didn’t look away. “I’m glad you came back, too,” I said, proud that my voice came out steady.

He smiled, and it made him look fifteen years younger. Not young and fragile, the way he’d looked that afternoon in my truck, slumped over right after he admitted that I wasn’t alone in liking men. 

No, now he looked young and alive – as if the past year fell right off his face and shattered on the rocky ground. As if he could sprint across the tundra, and reach up his hands to paint the darkening sky bright blue and gold, and bring me along with him straight up into the billowing clouds, far away from the rest of the earth where it slept on beneath our feet.

“I’ll break into your cabin at six-thirty then, Ranger,” he said, still smiling.

I finally allowed myself to smile right back, the same smile I’d had when I was twenty years old. I didn’t care what it looked like, only that he could see. 

“Deal,” I whispered back, before he finally turned and slowly walked back towards his little cabin, long legs balancing perfectly on the uneven bed of sun-warmed rock.

 

\--

 

It was sprinkling cold rain as we trudged through the damp moss. 

Sherlock had, as predicted, broken into my cabin at 6:30 on the dot. I’d woken up to the sound of his socked feet moving through the kitchen, avoiding the squeaking spots on the hardwood as he put on the kettle to start our coffee. I’d heard him get down the jar of peanut butter from the cabinet and pour oatmeal into bowls.

When I’d finally dressed and joined him out in the bright kitchen, filled with clear summer sun, he’d reached out and placed his hand at the top of my back, rubbing it the way he used to do what felt like years ago as he placed my mug of black coffee in my hands.

Then he’d frozen. I’d realized, all at once, that he had forgotten that he didn’t touch me like that anymore. Not now.

Just before he could move his hand away, I’d stepped closer to his side, and took my first sip of coffee. His fingers were tense on my back, poised to lift away at any moment.

“You know, you annoy the hell out of me sometimes,” I’d said quietly, with my mouth held over the warm steam from the mug.

His voice had been tense. “Oh? Why is that?”

I’d taken another sip. “You somehow manage to make better goddamn coffee than I’ve been able to figure out in almost two decades. With the same fucking beans and water and grinder that I use.”

His entire body had changed, tension melting out of his arms. His palm was firm again at the top of my spine, fingertips tracing the bones beneath my skin. “It’s absurdly simple,” he’s said, taking a sip of his own. “Your problem is you’ve no idea how to regulate the exact water temperature in ratio to the amount of grounds you’re using, plus there’s the question of whether you’re even grinding it to the correct consistency, which I doubt you’ve never had that pathetic excuse for a grinder correctly calibrated, and then there’s –”

“Sherlock,” I’d cut in softly.

He’d stopped mid-word and looked down at me with his mouth half-open, an annoyed frown on his face. “What? Don’t you want to know –”

“Sherlock, it’s six-thirty in the morning,” I’d said calmly, taking another sip of coffee and closing my eyes. I could smell him in the air – the crisp edge of his soap. “You can’t give me a lecture about something until at least eight.”

He’d sighed, and his fingers had brushed across my back for one more moment before they slowly fell away. “You can be dreadfully boring sometimes,” he’d said, setting down his own coffee before reaching over to steal mine from my hands and take a sip. He’d grimaced as he swallowed.

And I’d grinned at him softly, reveling in the sight of Sherlock Holmes in my kitchen, cradling my own coffee in his hands without any product yet in his curls. 

“I know,” I’d said, feeling like I was saying a million things more.

Toklat when we walked through it to catch one of the early busses had been sleepy and silent – the only sound on earth the crunching of our boots through the dirt and gravel. I’d felt like I was sneaking off the edge of the earth following in his wake – as if we would vanish from it all the moment we stepped off the Road, and leave everyone else behind, and wake up in a place where I could reach out and take his hand without looking over my shoulder. Without him pulling his hand away.

Now, as we dragged ourselves up steep, muddy slopes about a mile away from the Road, I shivered as the foggy mist covered my clothes and drenched my hair; it was too windy to wear a hat, and even my raincoat wasn’t saving me from the thick sheets of rain. Sherlock’s curls were dripping and plastered to his forehead and neck, and every time he huffed to brush them out of his eyes, the spray from his ringlets flew back and splattered across my face.

“Think you could, you know, angle your hair flipping some other direction?”

He flicked his hair back over his head again, showering me in more water. “It’s not my fault you’re short enough to be directly in the line of fire,” he said, not even looking back over his shoulder.

I marveled, yet again, that if any other person on earth had pointed that out, that I was so much shorter than another man, I would instantly feel icy fear grip tight in my chest. But with Sherlock Holmes saying it, I only wanted to laugh and run my hands through his curls.

The key was in my pocket, burning a warm outline into my thigh. I’d snuck back into my room right as Sherlock went out to lace up his boots on the porch before we left, and I’d looked back over my shoulder to make sure he wasn’t looking before opening the drawer, pushing aside the sock, and picking up the little key in my hands.

But I knew that he knew it was currently sitting there, hiding in my jeans, all the same. Just like I knew that he knew I wasn’t really planning on taking it out – not today. That I just needed to feel the weight of it once more close to my skin.

“I figured short jokes would be a bit below you,” I said, trying to catch up to his long strides. “A little pedestrian.”

I heard him chuckle, warm and deep, and saw a cloud of fog drift through the thick air around his mouth. I walked faster until I was finally walking by his side. I noticed him almost invisibly slowing his pace so we would match.

“Alas, Ranger,” he said, looking down at me with an odd warmth in his grey eyes. “Here we come to the point in our acquaintanceship where you realize I’m not nearly as clever as I claim to be. All just smoke and mirrors to hide the plebian within.” 

His eyes shone like pockets of sunlight through the grey mist – the first rays of dawn reflecting off the steely snow on Denali’s peak, burning fierce and bright even as he tried to look morose.

“Oh don’t act so fucking depressed,” I said, knowing that my own eyes were shining back in the same way. “I already found that out a long time ago. You’re just the same as the rest of us fools,” I joked. “Except when it comes to tracking down wolves.”

He hummed, grinning, then reached out quickly to catch my arm as I stumbled on some loose rocks. “You have a point there, Ranger,” he said, a bit breathlessly. His fingers stayed on my arm for a moment too long before falling away back to his side.

He licked the dripping mist from his lips before whispering out towards the fog-covered horizon, so quietly I wondered if I was really meant to hear. “But I suppose you’ve always been able to see right through me,” I heard him whisper.

Something surged through my chest – a flood of words that wanted to come pouring out in response. I clenched my jaw and swallowed them down, just as I usually did, and kept walking as if I hadn’t heard him.

But then I remembered the flame. . .

“You’ve always seen me, too,” I said before I could think twice, forcing the terrifying words out through my wet lips.

I looked over at his face, and I saw his mouth twitch into a sad smile aimed at the ground. He was silent for a few steps, only the sounds of our feet slushing through the thick, wet moss to break the earth’s still silence.

“I find myself unable to stop looking,” he finally said, speaking down at his feet.

My heart raced in my chest, and something breathless hummed in my throat. “Don’t stop looking,” I said quickly. 

He looked up at me surprised, with wet curls falling into his eyes. He didn’t brush them away. We stood still, somehow frozen, and the wind whipped the cool mist across our wet skin. I squinted through the fog as water dripped from my eyelashes down to my cheeks. 

“I don’t want you to stop looking,” I said again. “Sherlock, these last few days . . .” I trailed off on a soft sigh.

His eyes looked that same way they had on the Wonder Lake shore just a few days before, as his fingers clung tightly to my own. I knew I didn’t have to finish that sentence for him to understand what I meant. 

He reached out and pulled up the hood of my rain jacket, gently settling it on top of my head before brushing away the layer of water on my forehead with his thumb. His palms adjusted the shoulders of my jacket beneath my pack, then pulled my zipper up as high as it could go against the rain. 

“I won’t,” he whispered, his breath fogging warm in the cool air. The rain pattered onto our jackets, like pebbles skipping across a seamless lake. Steam rose from the drenched earth, swirling up into the thick, grey clouds.

My throat felt too tight to speak. I reached forward instead, towards the top button of his coat, and pushed the cold button through the hole, right at the base of his throat. My fingers lingered by his wet skin.

“Need to get you a real rain jacket,” I said, for some reason whispering.

He smiled, and I wanted to press my lips to the droplet of water clinging to the corner of his mouth. “Where would be the fun in that?” he asked. “Honestly, John, you’ve no sense of adventure.”

I laughed under my breath, then gestured around us at the wide open tundra and soaring mountains with my chin, all bathed in a swirling fog. “This isn’t adventurous enough for you then?”

Water dripped from his long eyelashes. “Well, not if I have you hovering at my elbow to keep me perfectly safe every step of the way. You suck all the danger out of everything with your compasses and your rules.”

I took a step closer, and the earth felt very small. Our breaths fogged together, and his eyes were the only clear things I could see through the heavy mist. 

“Are you asking me to stop?” I whispered.

His mouth twitched, and his tongue darted out to lick his wet lips. “No,” he whispered back. The fronts of our jackets brushed along each other in the warm space between us. “No, I’m not,” he said again.

I looked into his eyes, like pockets of clear blue sky in the storm of the misting grey. I wondered what he would compare my own eyes to if I ever asked him - if he’d ever really looked or wanted to notice their color. If he thought they were the color of the freezing lake, like my dad used to say, or the color of the night sky, the way that boy told me lying down in the warm grass, right before we went inside the hot barn that day in July.

The color of sadness, like my mom said with her back turned towards me in the kitchen, that night when I came home with a black eye from getting into a fight, and she told me that I should have had beautiful bright green eyes just like my sister.

I realized Sherlock was nodding his head towards the slope at his back, silently asking if we should keep moving along on our hike, and I cleared my throat as I finally broke our crackling gaze. 

“Hope this rain clears up,” I said lamely as we started to walk again.

He hummed. “It won’t,” he said, squinting his eyes to peer through the mist at the distant peaks.

I shook my head and hefted my pack higher on my shoulders. “Of course.”

We didn’t talk much more for the next couple of miles. The fog made it necessary to keep calling out for bears every few trudging steps, wary of coming across one and surprising it in the mist. Sherlock walked a bit ahead, choosing the best path, and I ambled behind, little waterproof pad in my hand, making quick notes for the backcountry office so I’d have something useful to turn in to Nick. 

I was aware of him, every step, just like I knew he was fiercely aware of me.

Nearly two hours later we were soaked to the bone. I could see Sherlock shivering where he slowly hiked ahead of me, nearly dragging his body across the moss and up the steep slopes of the creek’s banks, and every muscle in my own body felt tired and weary.

I paused for a minute and hurled my pack to the ground, then bent over to try and shield the contents from the rain as I searched through it for my map. I traced our route with a soaking wet finger as the raindrops immediately drenched the paper, causing it to crinkle in my hands. We were fairly deep into the Unit, almost to the last major fork of the creek, and I knew that there was a little valley about four hundred feet northeast from where we stood, surrounded on three sides by the taller peaks of the range. The creek waters were rising to a dangerous level with the rains, flooding the entire bed so there was no place to walk along its banks. We were going to have to ascend and walk back through the mountains, rising and falling with each new peak instead of getting to walk on flat elevation most of the way.

It was going to be a nightmare, and my muscled ached just thinking about it.

“It’s going to feel like shit traversing the ridges on the way back,” I suddenly heard Sherlock say. He was standing a few feet in front of me with his hands on his hips, breathing hard with his wet hair slicked back onto his head.

I nodded, too exhausted to be amazed that he’d read my mind. “Yeah,” I said simply. I shuddered at the sensation of water tricking thickly through my beard, making my face feel heavy and soaked. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt so miserable out in the tundra, wishing that the ground below me would just swallow me up whole so I wouldn’t have to haul myself back out to the Road.

And there was something else, something unsettled, in the way the static air clung to my skin, as Sherlock Holmes looked at me through the thick rain and fog. It was as if I was balancing on the highest peak of Denali in a storm, and the wind was whipping me back and forth, and I knew that I would fall and tumble into the depthless clouds any moment, unsure of where or how I would ever land in one piece.

I thought of what Sherlock might have done a year ago if we found ourselves in a similar situation. If he would have walked towards me in the rain, and instead of just doing up the zipper of my jacket, or awkwardly touching my back, if he would have pulled me into his arms and kissed warmth back into my lips. If he would have laughed with me up at the endless heavy clouds, or let me press him down into the cool, wet moss, covering him with my body’s warmth beneath the shelter of a grove of trees. 

Sherlock watched me for another moment, reading the thoughts on my face, before nodding up at the slope beside us. “Let’s get up to that clearing,” he said. “There’s a caribou trail here we can fairly easily follow which keeps us away from the scree. If we skirt along the edges of the valley we might be somewhat protected from this wind by the peaks. Make it back in about three hours rather than four.”

Again, I was too exhausted to be irritated that it had taken him five seconds to form a perfect plan without even glancing at the map in my hands. “Right, lead the way,” I said, hefting my pack back up onto my shoulders. “Just get me out of this fucking unit.”

I heard him chuckle ahead of me as we started up the slope, tearing our bodies through the thick brush at the bottom as Sherlock found the switchback path. “There now, Ranger, I thought I was the one who was supposed to complain whenever we’re out here. Hearing you do it makes me worried I’ve woken up in an alternate reality.”

I opened my mouth to respond, then quickly shut it. I was irritated at myself for complaining in the first place – something I never did, as Sherlock well knew. Instead I shook my head firmly and rubbed a palm over my face. 

“Sorry,” I said, a bit out of breath as we climbed. I dug my hands down into the mud to keep me from sliding back down the slope. “Sorry for dragging you out here.”

He looked back over his shoulder to respond, then suddenly lost his footing and started to slide down the steep grass, scrambling to get a hold of something to stop his slide. I cursed under my breath and dropped to my knees for leverage, then reached up and grabbed his waist as he fell down towards me. His legs slammed into my chest and knocked me from my perch, and then we were both sliding, losing our footing in the slanted grass and loose rocks, until finally Sherlock grunted and reached out to grab onto an exposed branch. We stopped sliding with a jerk, and I clung fiercely to his belt and waist until I could get my legs back under me.

“Fuck, you alright?” I finally asked, catching my breath. We were in a tangle of limbs, covered in water and mud, and I could hear that we were causing a small landslide of loose scree and branches below us. 

“Yes, you?” I heard him mutter from where his face was pressed into the moss. I grunted as I tried to shift upright again, then slid down helplessly once more in the slick mud. “Yeah,” I grunted out. I struggled for another minute to stop from falling down the slope, the weight of my pack trying to pull me off my balance as I finally shifted my body up onto my arms.

I heard an odd sound, then, as Sherlock started to turn underneath me onto his back, with his chest up to the sky. I looked down just as I became aware that my body was now hovering directly above his, and I realized that the sound I heard was him laughing. 

He was laughing, staring straight up into the raining, misty sky, with mud smeared on his cheeks and wet leaves strewn in his hair. He was laughing, young and open, and looking up into my face with sparkling eyes.

And I, exhausted and weary and soaked, with the rain battering down onto my back, I started to laugh, too.

We laughed together in the mist, and the sounds he was making were settling like warm shivers down my spine. Our legs were still tangled together, touching from our ankles to our hips. I could feel the heat from his chest radiating in the small space between our bodies. Water pooled in the wrinkles forming in the corners of his eyes.

“You look ridiculous,” I finally choked out, reaching up to wipe off a smear of mud from his face with my wet palm. 

He laughed harder. “You should see yourself,” he said back. Our faces were inches apart.

The flame roared in me, burning, flaring to life in the midst of the endless cold. It was crackling in my fingertips still lingering by his face, pressing my hips and chest down closer, and closer, and closer to his relaxed and easy body beneath mine. To the warmth of his wet skin, and the heat of his breath, and the silk of his hair; the soft curve to his smiling lips . . .

My pack was starting to ache on my shoulders where I still held myself hovering above him. I looked down at him one last time, eyes shining through the fog, then I rolled to the side and pushed myself up to my knees, trying to right my clothes.

We looked at each other, with him still lying calmly on his back, and the harsh rain that had been falling suddenly faded away into a soft mist. “Let’s get you up,” I finally said, nearly whispering.

He was still smiling softly, and he nodded, reaching up to take my waiting hand. His fingers were somehow still warm. After I’d finally hauled him to his feet, and we were both standing again, his hand stayed in mine for a few seconds too long.

By the time we made it to the top of the slope, climbing carefully to avoid another fall, my thighs were shaking and sore, and my shoulders were screaming for a rest.

I paused and looked up at the sky to stretch my back, closing my eyes against the mist. “Think we should –”

“We’ll take a break up here, yes.”

I opened my eyes to see Sherlock making his way around the outskirts of the valley, sticking close to the rolling, rocky slopes which surged up to the higher peaks. I followed him, realizing he was walking towards a more sheltered place at the base of a steep hill. The mist up in the valley was light and soft, gently wafting against my skin, but the clouds were still heavy and dark. A fog crept in with the breeze, slowly eating away the view. It clung to the droplets of water in the mist as I struggled to see, and was so thick in places I could only hear Sherlock walking up ahead of me – swallowing up his back and curls into an endless, impenetrable grey.

I had just reached his side and slid my pack to the ground when the fog rolled in so thickly I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face.

“Shit,” I whispered, “Not sure how we’re gonna –”

His hand suddenly gripped my wrist from out of the fog. I could feel the tension in his fingers, and I stood silently, with alarm radiating up my spine, until I heard it, too. A twig cracking close, about twenty feet to our right.

I froze.

The entire earth shrunk down to the feeling of his hand on my wrist, and the sound of the racing blood in my veins, our shakily held breaths, and then the shuffle, then drag, then crack of another step taken by whatever was creeping towards us in the fog, completely hidden within the thick mist. 

Sherlock’s fingers squeezed harder on my skin as my other hand silently reached for the bear spray in my pocket. I desperately wished that I was reaching for my gun instead, but it was sitting back in my cabin, unloaded and left behind, since I hadn’t worn my uniform even though I was technically on duty, all out of some misguided desire to feel like I was simply hiking with Sherlock Holmes.

I’d been an idiot.

Another twig snapped, this one even closer, and the shuffle and drag and clomp of a hoof or paw continued echoing through the mist, causing the long grasses and moss to hiss and whisper with its steps.

I clutched the spray in my fingers, and for a quick moment closed my eyes. I shifted my other hand so that my fingers entwined with Sherlock’s, with our palms pressed together in a fiercely tight grip. I could feel his pulse through the veins in his hand. 

I opened my eyes, and blindly held out the spray before my face, ready with the safety clipped off. I sucked in a deep breath and held it in a steady hand, desperate to see the shadow of whatever was moving closer through the mist.

“John,” I heard Sherlock breathe, the softest whisper, into the fog.

Suddenly, a burst of wind roared across the valley. It hurled at our backs, covering us in more spray, and then it blew through the dense fog in a rushing wave, clearing a path of sight for the first time since we’d set foot up in the clearing. I held my breath, waiting to catch a glimpse of what had been hiding in the fog. I peered through the hazy mist, desperately searching for a hoof or a claw or some fur.

A wolf burst through the tall grass not twenty feet away, sprinting away towards the other side of the clearing and leaving us at her back. Sherlock jumped at the sudden noise, and my own body shook with a jolt.

I watched, heart in my throat and adrenaline in my veins, as she eventually slowed and shook the dew from her fur. Her graceful legs brushed softly through the thick moss as she moved, light as air on her feet, and the hidden power in her legs flexed as she bowed down to stretch.

The mist and fog continued to rise, banished away by the fresh breeze, until a faint, grey light touched every distant corner of the clearing, a little pocket of visibility with just the dark clouds hovering above our heads.

Sherlock’s hand was still in mine.

I glanced quickly over our shoulders to make sure there wasn’t any more wildlife at our backs, scanning the distance for a rock that started moving, or any movement among the boulders dotting the riverbanks down below.

“John,” Sherlock whispered, squeezing my hand. I looked back to see another dark form moving in the tall grasses, making its way towards the female wolf standing tall rising out of the mist. 

A tiny, black nose burst its way up from the moss, followed by the small body of a stumbling wolf pup trying to follow its mother. Its little legs must have been less than two weeks old. 

Its fur was jet black.

We watched, hand in hand, as it slowly made its way to the mother across the clearing, slipping once in a wet puddle, until the mother walked forward and drew it close to her body with her snout. She licked the water from his fur, then nuzzled him with her face. For a few silent minutes, they stood perfectly still in the middle of the valley. The mother looked up every once in a while to sniff the air and listen, then bent her head back down to nuzzle the pup close against her legs. Its small pink tongue was hanging out of its mouth, and the breeze created a whisper through the soft, still silence.

Suddenly, the pup flopped over onto its back and wriggled, then leapt to its feet as the mother pawed the ground, yipping wildly and jumping up and down to play. The mist and fog continued to clear, and the tiniest rays of sunlight slowly warmed the clearing, giving us a clearer picture of the two wolves playing out in the grass, chasing each other as they ran and attacked. 

Sherlock sucked in a quick breath beside me. “It’s the same mother,” he whispered. 

I frowned at him. “What?”

He didn’t take his eyes off the two wolves in the far distance, slowly moving farther and farther away as they played and rolled through the grass.

“Last year – the pup we came across that was dead. The mother that found it. This is the same female.”

Something odd tingled in the back of my throat. I squinted my eyes to try and catch a better glimpse of the wolf, nuzzling the small pup before bounding after it across the field. “How can you be sure?” I asked, still whispering.

He swallowed hard and nodded. “Trust me, I’m sure.”

My throat felt inexplicably tight. I squeezed his hand harder. “She has a new pup,” I said, somewhat breathlessly and stating the obvious.

Sherlock just hummed softly beside me. I thought I felt, just barely, his thumb start to rub the back of my hand.

Eventually the two wolves disappeared from sight, running up and over one of the distant hills. They paused, for just a moment, atop the pile of boulders at the peak – two perfect silhouettes against the dense grey sky, before they darted off into the far mist, evaporating like ghosts.

I finally released the breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding. I looked back over our shoulders one more time, scanning again for any new movement creeping into the area. When I saw nothing, I turned back and pressed gently into Sherlock’s side. We both stared at the place where the two wolves had nestled together in the tall, wet grass.

I licked my lips, and then spoke softly enough that I wouldn’t shatter the odd calm that had descended over the clearing.

“I used to wish I’d met you when I was twenty years old,” I said. Sherlock’s still body subtly shifted beside mine. I knew that he was listening.

I went on. “I was twenty when I had my surgery, you know. I don’t think I ever said. I was . . . fuck, I was terrified. Never been out of South Dakota before, never been on a plane. Going on the word of what people had only whispered to me about – you know, they heard it from this person who heard it from someone else. There was this bar in Rapid City that I would take a long bus ride to a few times a year, after my sister already moved out across town to have her own place with her kids. My dad was drinking a lot by then, and my mom didn’t give a shit, so they didn’t realize if I was gone for more than a day. It was a . . . well . . . it was that kind of bar. For people like – you know, for men.”

I stopped to clear my throat, stunned that the words were pouring so effortlessly from my mouth. Sherlock’s thumb continued rubbing the back of my hand, and the mist continued to clear. I shifted on my feet, feeling my wet and muddy clothes stick to my skin.

“Anyway, the place really did exist in New York – this clinic you’d only know about if someone else told you. Probably looked like an idiot holding my backpack against my chest everywhere I went because I was scared as shit that it would get stolen, and every dollar I had was tied together in that bag. I don’t even really remember now what happened before they put me under, actually – what all they asked me and everything. I just remember . . . I remember waking up in so much pain. Most pain I’ve ever felt in my life. I think now looking back that they must have had my dosage wrong, for whatever pain medication they used – there’s no way in hell it should have hurt that badly. Like there were knives piercing into my lungs, and I couldn’t breathe. And nobody was there, in the room, when I first woke up. Was totally empty. I remember I wanted to . . . Actually, I . . . I wished my dad had been there with me, so fucking badly. Sherlock, you don’t know how much I . . . he would have seen how badly it hurt, you know? He would have tried to do something, get somebody to help –” 

I had to stop and clear my throat again, and Sherlock’s shoulder pressed warmly into mine. I realized I couldn’t even see the tundra in front of me; all I could see was the white hospital ceiling, and the flickering fluorescent light. The empty metal folding chair next to my hard cot.

“Anyway, eventually this nurse came in – woman who looked old enough to be my grandmother. I remember she came in and she said ‘Mr. Smith, you can have a mirror, if you’d like to see.’ First fucking time I was ever called Mr. anything in my life, even though I didn’t give them my real name. So I sat up, hurt like shit, and she held up a mirror for me, this little hand mirror, and . . . it was _flat_ , right? All covered in bandages and dried blood and all other shit but it was flat. _I_ was flat.”

As if on cue, I looked down at my own chest, covered by my layers and my raincoat and splashes of drying mud. My chest rose and fell calmly as I breathed, as if it had always been that way, and that shape. My bare chest which Sherlock had seen and kissed.

I spoke down at my feet. “So that woman, that nurse, she, uh . . . God, I can’t remember how much later it was, but right before they let me go, I remember she asked me what I was going to do, and I didn’t fucking know, because I had about twenty dollars in my pocket and I was in New York and that was it. So somehow she asked me what I wanted to do, if I could, and I told her it was ridiculous but I always wanted to work in the Park Service – that I grew up near Badlands and saw all the Rangers coming in to work. And she said, by whatever fucking coincidence of the universe, that she had a cousin worked in the offices over at Canyonlands in Utah, and two hours later she comes back in and says I have an interview there in a week, and she gave me the Greyhound bus schedule and a fifty dollar bill as I walked out of the clinic. I don’t even remember her name – don’t think I ever even knew it.”

For the first time since I started, Sherlock finally spoke beside me. His voice was incredibly soft. “So that’s the park where you worked first? Canyonlands?”

I nodded. “You ever been there?”

He shook his head. “Only have coyotes there, no wolves.”

I laughed under my breath. “Of course, no wolves. Why even visit?”

He looked over at me and smiled, and I swallowed hard when I saw that his eyes were glossy, as if they were wet. We shared a long look before he raised his eyebrows for me to continue.

“Right, well, I took the Greyhound from New York to Utah. Took me three days, I think. I remember I didn’t have anything to do on the bus, so I just stared out the window for hours. Thought a lot about things. You know.” And suddenly, deep in my chest, I knew that I would one day tell Sherlock Holmes all about those things. About the first time I ever said the name John, and how I knew, sitting on that bus, that I would miss my mom’s cherry pie. How loud the shotgun blast had been when my dad shot it into the sky. How he’d taken me and my sister to the neighbor’s house down the street who had a television set so that we could finally get to see ‘The Wizard of Oz.’

But for now, in that little clearing with the mist rolling away up the green hills, I squeezed Sherlock’s hand and blinked back the sudden water in my eyes. I knew my voice wouldn’t be controlled anymore when I spoke, but I forced myself to keep going.

“Last year, after we. . . after I left you,” I went on in a rough voice, “I used to wish, so badly, that I had met you during those three days I spent on the bus. That somehow you would have walked onto the bus with a bag over your shoulder, and we could have met back when I wasn’t . . . well, when I was young, and excited about everything. Before I got so . . .” I sniffed. “You know, I think I realized I would always be alone, at some point. That nobody would ever want . . . this. And I used to think, after everything that happened last year, that if I’d just met you when I was twenty on that bus, when I had the whole world ahead of me, I would have been whole, for you. I would have been someone who made you happy.”

He squeezed my hand hard. “You do make me happy,” he said in a fierce voice. “John, you did make me happy.”

I shook my head, refusing to be ashamed that a tear was falling down my cheek. “I know that now, I think,” I said. “Now I’m . . .” I turned to look at him, letting him see the emotions on my face. “I’m so glad I didn’t meet you when I was twenty,” I said. “I don’t know why, but I . . . I think I needed you to meet me like this. Who I am now. Who I’ve been . . .”

An odd light burned in Sherlock’s eyes. His voice was rough when he spoke. “Be fiercely grateful you didn’t meet me when I was that young,” he said. “I would have been an annoying twat high out of my mind, and I probably would have announced to the entire bus how I’d deduced about the surgery you just had.”

I barked out a laugh, perfectly able to imagine it, then I remembered . . . “Actually, that’s how it got so infected,” I said, the smile falling from my face. All I could remember was the pain. “I couldn’t keep the . . . them clean on the bus during that time. And then by the time I made it out to Utah I couldn’t . . . I was too afraid to go to an ER, you know? Didn’t know what they’d – So I tried to deal with it in the motel I stayed in that week. Filthy place. And everything was still infected when I had my first day on the job. I asked for my uniform shirt in a too-large size so I could still button it up over the bandages and two layers of shirts. Hurt like hell, God, it hurt, but . . . my nametag said ‘Ranger John Watson’ on it. First time I ever saw it written down, and I . . . it didn’t matter that it hurt like shit if I had that nametag, stupid as that sounds.”

“You and I both know that’s the farthest thing from stupid,” he said in a soft, wet voice. “I’m a genius, you can trust me.”

I grinned, feeling lighter than air. “You are a genius,” I whispered back. I let my eyes close for a moment, basking in the heat from his body against my face.

“John.”

The tone of his voice made me fling open my eyes. I gasped at the look I saw on his face – something like desperation. The same way he’d looked at me all those months ago when I passed by him outside the shower house and said, “ _Not now_.”

I stared straight into his eyes, unable to speak.

“John,” he said again, reaching out to hold my arms with both hands. “John, you are . . . you have to understand, you are –”

“I’m going to kiss you,” I suddenly heard myself say. I put a shaking hand in the center of his chest. “I’ve wanted to, for a while. I want to try –”

“You are the most astounding man. The most unbelievable, impossible –”

“Sherlock, let’s just . . . Let’s be tog–”

“Please,” he begged. He closed his eyes. “God, please.”

I stared at his face with his eyes squeezed close, and watched the nearly invisible shaking in his lips. There was still a small smear of mud across his chin, and his curls were starting to frizz up as they dried in the fading mist. I moved my hands up to caress the base of his neck, letting my fingertips trail along his jaw and the bottom of his cheeks. He signed through his nose and pressed his face sideways into my palm.

“I am so fucking glad you told Nick you were riding in my truck,” I whispered, because I needed him to know, to fully understand, that I didn’t regret anything that had happened – not a single moment. I brought his face slowly down towards my own as I spoke. His hands gripped harder at my shoulders, and chest shook where it pressed against my own.

“Sherlock,” I breathed across his mouth, and then I licked my lips, tasting the exhale of his warm breath, brushed my bottom lip lightly over his soft skin, and I kissed him.

He sighed against my mouth. The taste of his lips flooded across my tongue and down my throat, bursting with bright warmth, and the wetness from his mouth slowly glided across my own lips as I moved, caressing his mouth with mine. 

He was utterly still, his fingers still gripping into my shoulders, until I tilted my face, and ran my thumb along his cheek, and breathed a wet sigh against his lips with my tongue. I brushed his nose with my own, tracing his skin. 

Then he melted.

I felt his body crash into mine, burying itself against my skin, and his long arms wrapped around my back to grip my spine. He opened his mouth and let me lick across his tongue, gasping for desperate air, as the intimacy of our lips pressed together – the hidden secret of their taste – overwhelmed me with a longing I’d kept buried deep inside myself. 

He moaned, a soft sigh, from the back of his throat, and I felt the vibrations along my lips – the quiet, tender rasp of my beard against his smooth skin, the wet licks from our mouths, the shaking air in our lungs being exhaled across each other’s lips.

I heard a rough noise escape my own chest, desperate as I tasted him, and I finally pulled back just enough to take in a deep breath of air. I rubbed my nose along his.

“God, you . . .” I breathed. Our panting chests pressed together. 

I reached around to clutch at his back as he folded into my arms, burying his face in my neck with a rough sigh as he pressed a wet kiss to the side of my throat. “John,” I heard him whisper. “John, you’ve no idea. . . You’ve no idea --”

He clutched me in his arms, holding the back of my neck close as he kissed my bare skin – the softest presses of his mouth as his chest shook beneath my palms.

I tilted my head back to look up at the sky, shivering at the weight of him in my arms, and I gasped at the sight that met me as I opened my eyes.

The dark clouds had cleared, the mist was completely gone. I looked up, mouth open, and I saw that the vast sky had transformed into the bluest of blue, endless and bright and illuminated by the warm sun. I closed my eyes again as the rays beat down onto my face, clearing away the water from the rain and covering my skin in fresh air. I wound my fingers tightly into his curls and held the back of his head against me, holding him impossibly close.

I kissed the top of his head, and I breathed in the achingly familiar scent of his curls, now dry and warmed by the brilliant sun bursting through the clear sky.

“Sherlock,” I whispered, with my face pressed into his hair. “Sherlock, you are . . . you are the person I . . . my one -- "

He kissed me, tasting the rest of the words on my lips. I gasped against him, clutching him fiercely, as his kiss burned hot and wet across my skin. I groaned into his mouth as his hand held my jaw, smashing my body and lips against him as close as I could get, not even caring if I could breathe.

When he pulled away, panting, I grabbed fistfuls of his jacket in my hands over his chest. His lips were full and glistening beneath the sun, and his eyes were shining and wet.

“John,” he said, staring down into my eyes, then he shook his head and flashed a huge smile up at the sky. He laughed once, under his breath, and looked down at me again. It felt like looking straight at the sun, bringing tears to my eyes.

“John,” he said again, breathlessly, before he leaned forward and pressed a long kiss to my forehead, wrapping me tightly in his arms and unable to say anything else.

I clutched him so tightly I thought my bones would meld with his. I could feel every racing beat of his heart pumping in his chest.

I pressed my cheek into his neck and gulped down the smell of his warm skin. “I want you to come back with me,” I said, whispering it into his clothes. “Come back to my cabin when we’re in Toklat. Stay with me. Don’t go back to your own place.”

“Yes,” he breathed against my forehead. “Yes, all of that, yes.”

I took a deep breath. “I want you to stay with me, in my bed. Sleep with me and stay the night.”

His body shook once hard in my arms. His voice was choked and wet. “God, yes.”

I lifted my cheek from his chest and stared up into his face. A tear dripped down from his shining eyes, rolling down his cheek until I caught it with my thumb. His face was even more radiant than the endless sky.

Now, more than ever, I needed him to truly know.

“This means . . .” I started. I took another deep breath and gathered my thoughts. “This means I’m with you, wherever you go,” I said.

He caught my hand on his chest and lifted it up to his mouth. He kissed my palm for a long moment against his warm lips. “Wherever we go,” he whispered. 

He leaned forward to kiss me once more on the mouth, this time soft and slow, just holding our lips together. I held his face in my hands.

The softness of the kiss seemed to settle the racing in my heart, covering over everything with a heavy, soft calm. He looked into my eyes for another long moment, breathing perfectly in sync, and then he frowned.

“I have never, in over fifteen years, wanted to be out of the wilderness as desperately as I do right now,” he said.

I threw back my head and laughed. He stood in front of me and crossed his arms over his chest as I bent down to pick up my pack and heaved it back onto my shoulders. I was still smiling.

“How can you be smiling about this?” he demanded as we started to make our way towards the ridge we would follow back. “This is _unbearable._ ”

I wiped my hand over my mouth, then reached over to rub the top of his neck. “Let’s get you home,” I said, chuckling, and he sighed dramatically as he followed my path.

We walked for another minute, just up to the crest of the ridge, when Sherlock spoke again, this time in a voice that was low and soft.

“What you told me earlier,” he said, speaking out towards the little sliver of the Road in the distance. “I . . . I also realized I would be alone. Before . . . until we met.” He looked at me once, quickly, as if he was afraid of what I would say, then looked back towards the horizon, watching the last remaining storm clouds be blown away. “Everything about this feels absolutely irrational. I can’t – it doesn’t make any sense.”

And to my surprise, I smiled again, and reached out to take his hand in mine. I squeezed his fingers once before letting them fall away. “It is irrational,” I said. “But I thought you were the one with the sense of adventure?”

“I retract my earlier statement,” he said back, scrambling over some rocks as we made our way down a steep slope. “You’re the one who got on a bloody plane to fly to New York. All I do is just run around trying to find wolves in improper outerwear before I get ‘mauled out in the wilderness’ as you’ve so elegantly put it.”

And after I laughed, and then pulled him down to kiss him again in full view of the sky, he walked by my side, with our shoulders brushing, and he told me of the very first time he ever came across a moose out in the wild, back during his first season working with Greg. 

And his voice kept me laughing all the way back to the Road, filling my chest with warmth until the flame within me burned even brighter than the sun itself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, thank you, thank you. 
> 
> This chapter was a tough one for me to get out. So much was riding on those final moments together, and that first true reconciliation, that I wanted to get it right. In the end, I let John and Sherlock decide where it needed to go, and I hope you felt their love along with them. Sometimes it's the smaller moments instead of the grand declarations, you know?
> 
> Especially as we near the end of this journey, your comments and kindness are ALL the more treasured! I am so grateful every time I get to hear back from you all, and squee about Rangers, and fall in love with Ranger Watson, and swoon over Sherlock Holmes in the middle of the vast Denali wilderness. You all are what make writing this fic so special, and I truly can't wait to hear from you :)
> 
> Lyrics to "Build Me Up From Bones" by Sarah Jarosz (aka: a song that was literally written for Johnlock in The Bluest of Blue):
> 
> Build me up from bones  
> Wrap me up in skin  
> Hold me close enough to breathe me in   
> /  
> The moon's a fingernail  
> Scratching on the back  
> Of the night in which we lay beside  
> /  
> I held every inch of you  
> I wrote every line for you  
> I made time when time was all but gone  
> You're the love I've always known  
> /  
> The night's so dark and grey  
> But you've helped me find my way  
> Through the wild and wonders of this world  
> /  
> So take me with you now  
> I need to show you how  
> I can love you better than before  
> /  
> Play it sweet and low  
> We've got nowhere to go  
> I am yours, and you're the love I know
> 
> \--
> 
> Next time: So, what really happened at the end of 1991? I mean, I know we sorta know. . . we kinda get it. . . but, seriously, what the fuck happened between these two idiots?


	14. August - Early September 1991

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bluegrass-ish: Listen to "Where Do My Bluebird Fly" by The Tallest Man on Earth [HERE.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Giuw53r2BQ/)
> 
> Sarah Jarosz: Listen to "Run Away" [HERE.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwKoGKp0QXk/)
> 
> *Some content warnings for this (admittedly rough) chapter -- SOME SPOILERS BE AHEAD:
> 
> There are brief but explicit suicidal thoughts and ideas from John during the scene where Molly mentions Seattle. Brief animal death when Sherlock discusses wolves while they camp. There is an intense dysphoric experience for John while being physically intimate with Sherlock during their first night camping in the tent, as well as some very negative internal thoughts in the aftermath. Brief and vague past reference to violence against a trans woman, a transphobic slur, and her possible death during John's memory of being back in a 'regular' bar in Rapid City, SD as a teenager. And, as always, some pre-transition memories from John's life, including abuse from his parents.
> 
> I know these are hard topics. If you have any questions before reading, ways to contact me are in my profile. Be safe, and comfortable, and remember that we know they get their happy ending in a year :) Enjoy, friends.

August – Early September 1991

 

“Are you sure?”

I looked up at Sherlock in the dim light of my bedroom lamp, tearing my gaze away from the ripples of warm light across the rumpled sheets on my bed. Two of his curled hairs were strewn across the white sheets, buried in wrinkles from gripping hands. The sheets were still warm.

He gently cradled the syringe in his long, steady fingers. The needle seemed to pierce the buzzing air between us, making everything hot and sharp, as if the air itself was about to snap, and both of us were preparing for the burst of pain.

We looked at each other, and he waited. I didn’t know how I would respond.

We’d spent the whole day side by side in my truck like normal, driving between each of the Ranger stations to prep them on security for the upcoming Road Lottery in September. Sherlock had huffed and complained the whole way, saying how it was all a disaster to let “common idiots” drive their own vehicles on the Road, and how we were destroying the entire ecosystem, and how it shouldn’t be our fault if everyone gets eaten by bears. 

And the entire time I hid my grin and shook my head, patting his knee whenever he got to the end of a long speech before I climbed out of the truck and headed towards my next bit of work, knowing that he would be there waiting for me when I got back – feet propped high up on the dashboard and curls in the open breeze.

It was on the final drive back to Toklat when it had happened – when he’d reached over with his hand, and rubbed it slowly up my thigh, then suddenly pressed his palm between my legs, right over the soft bulge of my cock through my uniform pants. And when I’d cursed at him and told him that I was fucking driving, and still technically on shift, he’d simply smirked at me and rubbed the heel of his hand harder, so I could really feel it, and he kept up the rhythm, with the muscles of his forearm flexing, until I was bucking up into his hand with my hips while I drove. Until I’d finally gripped the steering wheel with white knuckles and pulled over to the side of the road, then watched as his hand disappeared into my pants, gripping me through my boxers, breathing hard until I thudded my head back on the headrest and silently came.

The second we’d finally made it back to my cabin at twilight, after hosing off the truck the quickest way we ever had, I’d dragged him through the shadows of the Toklat trees by the wrist, and pulled him into my cabin, and pushed him up against the wall so I could kiss deeply into his mouth. Which had led to our clothes thrown down and strewn across the floor, except my boxers, and tripping into the bedroom like I always imagined teenagers must do it, and falling into oceans and seas of white sheets, caressing his skin while I tasted him with my tongue and lips. The sounds of his sighs had been reckless and undone, echoing in my ears and moaning up my spine.

And then, as he was relaxing in my arms and breathing in our combined scent, just as the little dust particles were starting to settle back down on my sheets, I’d suddenly realized that I missed my shot the day before. The moment my body had tensed, he’d immediately sat up and somehow known.

“Your shot,” he’d said, so calmly, as if he wasn’t saying anything out of the ordinary at all. As if he was just talking about a flu vaccine, or a vitamin, and not the little syringe that the older doctor in Fairbanks, the one whose name I’d gotten from my previous doctor in Death Valley right before I moved Parks, had held in his hands during my first visit, when I was trying not to sink back into the fading wallpaper with shame, and he’d said, chuckling, “ _Well, here’s your magic lie in a bottle, then, son,_ ” as he handed it over, and it had taken me almost a year to find another doctor to go to, nearly all the way south in Anchorage, who handed over the drugs every three months without a word.

I’d swallowed hard and stared up at the ceiling, not meeting his gaze. “Yeah,” I’d said back, after too long a pause. My palms on his skin felt clammy and cold.

He’d traced through the hair on my chest with his fingers, the way that beautiful women did in old Bond films as they smoked cigarettes, with a tropical breeze blowing through the window, and expensive scotch in a gold-rimmed glass. The moment felt heavy and drawn out, and I wondered if he was thinking, dragging his fingertips across my chest, that none of it was really real – that it was all part of a fabrication, a costume, a disguise inside my own veins.

“I can go –” Sherlock had started to say, when suddenly I’d heard myself blurt out, “Will you do it?”

And so we found ourselves there less than five minutes later, sitting by the flickering light of the old lamp, with his grey eyes fixed on mine, and my syringe in his hands – the first time I’d seen it in anyone else’s hands but my own.

He knelt on the floor before me, still completely naked, and I found myself transfixed by the small wrinkles in the corners of his eyes and around his mouth. Proof that he was human, and that he had lived. That he wasn’t some dream.

“Are you sure?” he asked again, or for maybe the third time, or even the fourth. His fingers gripped the syringe with a sad familiarity, and I tried not to think in that moment of the reason why he knew so well how to use it.

In that moment, sitting there in the heavy silence of the earth, I wanted to tell him about the first time I remembered ever going to get a shot – when my dad had taken me to the clinic four towns over to get I don’t even remember what vaccine. Back when I was six or seven. 

I wanted to tell Sherlock how I had reached out for his hand, completely terrified of the needle, and he had started to pull his fingers away, and thumped me hard on the back, and said, “ _Come on, now, don’t be scared like your sister. Take it with your chin up. Come on, now._ ” How I’d nodded and blinked away my tears and let go of his hand, then held my head high as the terrifying shot went into my arm.

And I wanted, without even knowing how I would ever form the words, to tell Sherlock how, when I was twenty-three, I sat in a little motel room two hours outside Canyonlands, with a brand new syringe in my own shaking hands. How I’d rented the room so I wouldn’t have to figure out how to do my first shot in the crowded Ranger bunks. How I’d used two whole vacation days just to do it.

I wanted to tell him how I’d gripped the piece of paper in my hands, the instructions the doctor had given me back at the clinic earlier that morning – gripped it until it wrinkled and nearly ripped. How, at the moment I finally took a breath and held the needle to my skin, how I’d heard in my head, “ _Take it with your chin up, now, don’t be scared,_ ” and how I’d imagined I could feel that first press of testosterone burn through my body, instantly making right all my incorrect bones. How I’d imagined I could feel my dad’s palm on my back.

“I’m sure,” I told Sherlock, giving him a quick nod. My voice sounded like I hadn’t used it in days.

I expected him to nod back seriously, or double-check that everything was correct, or ask me if it was alright one more time.

But instead, he looked up at me, kneeling with his bare knees on the hardwood floor, and he smiled. His eyes twinkled in the wavering light, and the wrinkles in the corners of his eyes deepened like beautiful crags – the valleys etched into the vibrant earth of Denali by the rushing rivers, flowing over the edge of the horizon like swirled marble. The ones you could only fully see looking down from the tallest peaks. 

Before I could smile back, he looked back down at his hands. My thigh twitched. He pushed up the fabric of my boxers to reveal my bare skin, then effortlessly, without any hesitation at all, pressed the needle into my thigh.

Everything was silent. I wasn’t afraid.

I felt us both holding our breath as the slow, tingling burn started to flicker under my skin, pressing against his palm which was rubbing slowly along my thigh, tickling the hairs. And I felt, in that moment, that his palm was actually underneath my skin itself, reaching deep into my muscle and bone. That his fingers were surging through my blood, fixing every little sticking-out part of my body back into place, and burning with a strange heat through the soft cock that still sat in the pouch in my boxers, much cooler than warm skin.

I didn’t realize I’d moaned until I heard him suck in a breath in response.

Before I could say anything, try and explain what was happening to me, or why this flame was running up my neck, Sherlock was cleaning and putting away the needle faster than I ever thought possible. I fought down a wave of nausea in my gut – that it was all too much for him, and too bare, and that he was trying to leave as fast as he could. I watched him, mouth pressed shut, with a desperate plea for him not to leave on the tip of my tongue. I waited.

But the second that everything was put away in the little pouch, he was surging up towards my face with his large hands, and gripping my neck and jaw, and pulling me down to kiss me hotly on the mouth, open and wet. 

Shocked relief exploded through my chest. Fire rolled down my spine in a thick, heavy heat. It wasn’t the brilliant sparks or aching pulse that I usually felt when Sherlock’s lips were on mine. It wasn’t that heady, breathless, vibrating excitement, or the stunning disbelief, or the wild, untamed, _wanting_ thing that snarled in my core and burned in my thighs.

It was. . .

It was desperation, the way Sherlock’s warm hands gripped my jaw – my beard just barely growing back in after I’d let him shave me two weeks ago. It was a breakable, quiet thing, as he silently shifted to his feet, not breaking our kiss, and climbed on top of my lap on the bed, straddling my thighs with my tongue in his mouth. Desperation as his soft, bare cock pressed against my own through a thin layer of fabric, not even erect, and yet somehow, with his wet lips moaning across mine, it was the most intimate thing he’d ever done to me – the most erotic. As if his hands had physically pressed the testosterone into my muscle, burying themselves beneath my layers of skin, covered in my own warm blood. 

As if seeing the stripped-down physicality of me as John Watson, the reason for my beard and my face and my chest, distilled to liquid in a little bottle and a needle in a thigh, was somehow sex in itself. Was a truer sex than the sex we just had in the rumpled sheets, gasping and sweat-covered and rocking the bed against the floor.

The weight of his body on my thighs was intoxicating. I held him in my hands and surrendered as his fingertips trailed over every inch of my body – my jaw and my neck, the rises of muscle on my chest, the lines of my ribs. They wound through my hair, tracing the greying strands, and his thumb brushed across my lower lip, wet from his own mouth. 

It was slow.

I realized, as his body settled heavily on top of mine, and as he sighed into my mouth, that neither of us was touching the other person to try and come. That his hands on my skin, warm and firm, were touching me to feel, as if his fingertips themselves could seep below the surface and touch the testosterone itself, making my body one with his.

Sweat prickled on my forehead at the same time it dripped down his spine. The air was thick and choking, clogging up my lungs. He was on me, and in me, and surrounding me in the air. He was the warmth within my own marrow – kissing the surface of my beating heart through my lips. I tasted inside his mouth, slowly lapping at his tongue, and as his soft groan echoed through my bones, I noticed that everything felt too heavy.

Too real.

My chest panged. I kissed him one last time, small and wet, before pulling away, lips tingling and swollen. His breath was warm where it puffed across my open mouth. For a moment, we both froze there, trapped within each other’s arms, with the weight of his body pressing on the tender spot on my thigh from the needle.

Outside, the wind blew a few stray branches against the bedroom window, crackling against the glass in a shower of taps. The room unfroze. 

Sherlock held my jaw for one more moment in his hand and looked at me with an unreadable expression on his face. My skin burned where he’d touched me. Then he slid his fingers away without another word, and he moved to step off me back onto his feet. 

I let him go, trailing my palms over his bare skin as he moved away, until my fingertips were just brushing the empty air. He didn’t meet my gaze as he stooped to pick up his underwear from where it had been thrown off near the bedroom door. He pulled them on. Our deep breathing echoed in the room, mixing with the soft pads of his bare feet on the wood floors. He reached out to flip on the light to the main room of the cabin, flooding the bedroom with fresh, bright light – harshly illuminating the areas of my bedroom that had before been in shadow. It made the bare skin of my stomach look fluorescent and fake.

He extended his hand to pick up the pouch still sitting next to my bed.

For the first time in nearly two minutes, our eyes met.

I saw in them, with something like a terrifying punch, that his grey eyes were just as afraid of the heaviness as I had been – that he had noticed, too, how the press of his warm, soft body against mine right after he gave me my shot had been something else entirely, as if he had reached straight inside my skin, an act that could never be undone. As if our lungs had joined, pumping hot blood straight into each other’s bodies.

For a moment, I thought of the key sitting in the drawer. If I should take it out and thrust it at him and tell him that every time I’d taken my shot for the last twenty years, I’d always still felt that tiny spark of fear at the needle, but how just then, just now, I hadn’t felt any fear at all as his steady fingers guided it into my own thigh.

But he was still naked, nearly naked, and he broke our stunned gaze before I could say anything more. He grabbed one of my old t-shirts from out of the closet and throw it over his lean frame. Then he walked out into the kitchen to start the kettle for some tea. He left the pouch still sitting on the bedside table untouched.

I looked down at my thigh, feeling like I was moving in slow motion. Nothing seemed real as I moved my fingers over the place where he had given me the shot, as if the warm, firm thigh of my body beneath my hand was just my imagination, or someone else’s leg entirely. 

“You have some frozen salmon in here,” I heard Sherlock suddenly say from the kitchen, voice completely normal. “Should I heat that up?”

I cleared my throat and got to my feet too quickly. I reached out and gripped the wall as the room spun. “Yeah,” I said back, unsure if I even said the word out loud. But I heard him get out the pan for the stove, and the rustle of the bag of fish from the freezer.

I stood there for one extra minute in the empty room, trying and failing to feel the warmth that had been there before.

I wondered, as I finally picked up the pathetic little pouch and threw it up into my closet, how I would possibly find the words to tell Lugnut what had just happened. That Sherlock had just held my shot in his bare hands, and pressed it into my skin, and then _kissed_ me. How that kiss had felt like none he’d ever given me before.

How I’d pulled away.

 

\--

 

I watched Molly’s back where she stood over her stove, fixing up her long hair into a messy bun. 

She was cooking for us, just like she normally did whenever I came over. Even after all those years, I still asked her every time if she would let me help her out and cook instead. And every time, even after all those years, she still shoved me out of her kitchen, not believing I could make anything more than canned soup, and telling me to make myself useful and fix something, or chop her some more wood.

The homemade stew she was throwing together for us was bubbling on the stove, and the air in her cabin was thick with the smell of moose meat she’d bought off one of the bus drivers who got a moose hunting permit last week. She was wearing one of Greg’s oversized flannel shirts, thrown on over basketball shorts, and I thought, for the millionth time, that she somehow managed to make absolutely anything look beautiful, in a way that teenaged-me would have never even been able to imagine.

“So,” she said, moving her lips around the hair-tie in her mouth, “You haven’t told me yet what your plans are for the winter?”

I set down the broken snowshoe I’d been fixing for her on the kitchen table, glad that her back was to me so she didn’t see the brief look of nerves that shot across my face. I cleared my throat to buy time. 

The key was still sitting in my pocket.

“Oh, you know. My usual, I guess. Got my cabin in Talkeetna waiting for me – I stocked it up before I left to come here for the season.”

I saw Molly’s shoulders tense from over the stove. She picked up the spoon and started lazily stirring the stew.

“Oh,” she said slowly. She cleared her throat. “I guess I just thought –”

The hair on the back of my neck rose. I stared down at the broken snowshoe in my hands, as if my answer would be written in the broken strap. “You thought . . .?”

“Nothing,” she said quickly, getting down two bowls. “I, uh . . . well, Greg and I are taking a week down in Seattle in September, right after I close down the summer kennels. You ever been to Seattle?”

I almost laughed out loud. The memory slammed into me, blacking out Molly’s familiar cabin kitchen in front of me and replacing it with a glittering city bathed in fog – a city I hadn’t thought about in nearly ten years.

I’d spent twenty-four hours in Seattle, give or take, the year I drove my truck up from Death Valley to Denali for the first time. After three hours staring at the outline of the Space Needle through my motel window in the dark, watching the lights twinkle as it drifted through the thick fog, I’d heaved myself to my feet, forced myself outside, and walked down smaller and smaller streets until the bars started to look like places where my younger self would have wanted to go.

Except I hadn’t gone into any of them, not even slowed down as the thick metal doors opened and closed again and again with blasts of pulsing music and hot air. Groups of sweating, dancing men with their hands on each other’s’ bare chests. And I’d somehow found myself standing by myself at the end of a creaking pier, alone at the edge of the cold sea, with the icy wind in my face. The wood beneath my palms was wet and smelled like salt, and I’d felt that the entire earth was sleeping at my back, pushing me out towards the water and the horizon line with thick silence, bathed in black. 

I’d stood there for what felt like hours, wondering if I wouldn’t be better off just walking off the splintered wood, letting the icy sea swallow up my skin. I’d thought of James, far away and starting his day in Baltimore. I’d wondered what the man next to him looked like when he woke up, cuddled close against James’ warmth, knowing the scent of his bare skin in a way that I never, ever would.

I’d stood there, watching the fog until the sea birds started to sing, and the fishermen made their way on aching legs down to the rusting boats. I’d watched their huge, rough hands grab at wet rope and sea-stained nets.

I was between two worlds, far out of the minds of everyone in back Death Valley, and just a name on a sheet of paper to a group of faceless Rangers to the north. I was a nobody, expected by no one, with no one on earth who knew that I was standing alone on a pier, and that I was John. No one who knew that I had existed before I was nineteen years old, and also no one who knew that I existed now.

I’d wanted to drown. Have the last thing I felt on earth be my own hand on my flat chest, reminding myself that I had been real, and that I had been true. That I, John Watson, had been undeniable flesh and bone. And then I could close my eyes and rest, and no longer remember the taste of my mom’s cherry pie. No longer remember the warmth of my dad’s hand on my back, or the smell of my sister’s shampoo, or how loud the shotgun blast had been.

I could just rest, and be buried at sea with a bulge still between my legs, and it wouldn’t matter to my ghost at all what name they ended up carving into my grave.

Just as my grip tightened on the wet wood, and my legs tensed to jump, my eyes were drawn to a sudden movement far out in the misty bay. For some reason, I’d stood there frozen, riveted on the spot where something huge and black had moved beneath the water. And I’d finally gasped as the head of a gigantic gray whale suddenly exploded from the calm surface, bursting up into the sky with a booming plume of spray. 

It had arched up into the mist, shining like silver in the dawn, and it was just close enough that I saw its beady black eye, as if it was fixed on me - _me_ \- out of every other human being on the whole west coast. Then it disappeared back into the sea in a great splash of foam and sea, muffled, as if it had dived down into midnight blue velvet.

And I’d suddenly known, even though I hadn’t yet set eyes on the damn place, that Denali – that little circled speck on the map in my truck – that it was my home, calling out to me across the black water through that gray whale. That for the first time since I handed over that backpack full of cash to the nurse, I was finally making the right choice in my life.

That I didn’t care whether James ever thought of my name again. That I wanted to live.

And I’d realized, as the sleepy city started to come alive at my back, that even though I’d spent the better part of the last ten years as a Ranger in National Parks, that there, now, standing on the Seattle pier, with the invisible hints of the Alaska wilderness hovering just beyond the foggy horizon, I was finally about to become a Ranger. That I was finally free.

“Spent the night there in a hotel on my first drive up here,” I said to Molly, blinking out of the memory. I watched Molly spoon out steaming stew into the bowls. “Didn’t see the city at all, really, just . . slept there and kept driving.”

Molly snorted over the black pepper she was cracking over the stew. “You men are all alike. Get to go out and see the world on your own, no cares at all, no worries or fears . . .” She kept talking as she set a bowl in front of me, slowly shaking her head, “And all you have to say about it is that you saw the inside of a hotel and got some sleep.”

I barked out a laugh and talked over a warm mouthful of stew. “I spent a few hours standing on a pier after I couldn’t sleep. Watched the fishermen go out to their boats. Saw some seagulls out in the distance. Does that count?”

Molly’s eyes brightened across the table. “Did you see that famous market? Where they throw the fish?”

I frowned. “The what --?”

“Nevermind.”

She huffed and rolled her eyes at me and started to shove a mouthful of stew into her mouth. I grinned at her and winked.

“Of course I saw Pike Place Market, you ninny,” I said, and then laughed as she kicked me under the table with her socked foot.

We didn’t talk much while we ate, just both enjoyed the easy silence that came from countless dinners spent over that kitchen table. By the time I got to my feet to clear up our dishes, I could tell something was on her mind from the way she was frowning down at the worn wood. I kept my ears open, waiting, as I washed the dishes at the sink with my back to her.

Then she spoke, so softly I had to stop scrubbing the dish in my hands to hear.

“I’m going to miss him,” she said.

My heart sank. I’d never heard her voice sound so lost before – so young and wavering and small. I wanted to run out of the cabin, go find Greg, and drag him back out east by the collar. Yell in his face that he couldn’t possibly leave Molly Hooper alone for a whole entire winter, not after I saw the way her face lit up each time she talked about him all summer. Not after he made her eyes shine like the stars.

I could hear her fingers tapping out a random pattern onto the wood table. When she didn’t say anything else, I spoke into the silence. “Seven months is a long time,” I agreed gently. “Of course you’ll miss him.”

And as I stood there in Molly’s warm cabin, clenching the soapy sponge in my hand, I forbid myself from thinking of the key in my own pocket, what would happen if Sherlock said no, what would happen if he went back to London on that plane beside Greg, leaving me behind, and I wouldn’t even be able to tell Molly that I was going to miss him as if I was missing one of my own limbs, because for all she knew he was just my colleague and my friend. Not the man who held me when I woke up each morning, and let me hold him, too.

I heard her sigh. “I feel stupid,” she finally said. “It’s not like it’s gong to be seven whole months – not really. We’ll meet up with each other a few times – Greg said something about a vacation somewhere where it’s warm, someplace south. And there’s obviously the phone in the offices. And letters. . .”

Her voice trailed off, and I suddenly realized the thick ball of unspoken emotion hiding behind her words. 

“But he’s . . . not coming back next season?” I said.

Her chair scraped on the wooden floor, and I suddenly felt her arm against mine as she reached into the sink and picked up another dish to wash. She didn’t meet my eyes.

“I don’t know,” she said. “He doesn’t know.” She looked down at her hands washing the bowl and sighed through her nose. “The NPS isn’t paying them to come back next season, you know? None of their team. So unless something new pulls through, or he finds some other way . . .”

“He’ll be in London,” I finished for her quietly.

She nodded down at her hands, then sniffed and quickly wiped a hand over her face. “God, I hate this,” she said. She laughed under her breath and took a step away from me before I could decide whether to put my arm around her shoulders. “I always told myself I wouldn’t be the silly girl who cried over a boy,” she said, staring up at the ceiling to blink the water out of her eyes. 

It physically ached in my chest to watch her hands shake. I realized that my own eyes were embarrassingly wet. “You’re not a silly girl, kid,” I said, glad my voice was steady. “And Greg’s not just a boy,” I went on, feeling bold. “He’s . . .” I raised my hand searching for the right word. “You know, he’s your . . .”

She nodded even before I could finish the sentence with a small smile on her lips. “Yeah, I know,” she said under her breath. “He is.”

I took a step towards her, but she put up a hand to stop me. “No, no, if you come and hug me right now I’ll lose it all over again,” she laughed.

My hand fell back awkwardly at my side as I matched her tired smile, and I stood there leaning on the counter, watching her try and pull herself together. I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her cry – if I’d ever even seen it before. I suddenly wondered if she was one of those kids who tried fiercely not to cry when they were little. If she was like me, when I’d clench my hands, and stomp my feet, and scrunch up my whole face just to keep a tear from escaping my eye.

I remembered how I’d wanted to cry during that sunrise in Seattle, as the warm hints of the sun were just starting to pool across the misty waters, and I’d clenched my hands on the rotting wood beam to keep me from throwing myself over into the sea. And I’d wondered, as the salt breeze brushed the heat from my face, and the plume of the grey whale glittered up into the dawn sky, if it would have looked sadder for a bystander to see a woman crying alone on the sagging pier at sunrise, or a man.

I still stood there as she re-tied her hair up into a bun, wiping one last time at the tear-track on her face. The sudden, fierce urge to pull her into my arms surprised even myself. I’d never felt such a protective rush towards even my own sister – even that night she sat by my side on my little attic bed, hunched over her pregnant belly and crying into her hands.

I waited to speak until we were already busy again clearing up the kitchen, me washing the dishes while Molly ladled stew into Tupperware to freeze.

“You’ll be alright, kid,” I said softly, not looking up at her over my shoulder. “The both of you will be alright.”

The sounds of us cleaning the kitchen sounded more domestic than any evening I’d ever heard back in our falling-apart house in South Dakota. It took her almost two whole minutes to finally answer me back, “Thank you, John.”

When I gave her a quick hug goodbye outside her door half an hour later, Molly held me by the shoulders before I could take a step away.

“You’ll be alright, too, yeah?” she said.

For one brief moment, everything around me turned to ice. It seemed impossible that she knew, unbelievable that she had seen, and yet . . . maybe Greg had told her the meaning behind what I mentioned to him that day a few weeks ago in the car, or maybe she had seen the way my eyes lingered on Sherlock’s neck, or maybe she had seen us hold hands in the shadows, heard the way I said his name, seen our lips touch –

“I mean, you think you’ll keep in touch?” Molly was saying, after I had no idea how long I stood there frozen. “You’ve become such good friends, I don’t think you have to never see him again . . .”

And I could tell, all at once, that she really meant what she said, that we were friends. I breathed out a silent sigh of relief, and tried to will my hands to stop shaking. Tried to tamp down the self-hatred and shame that I was even this affected by her finding out the thing that made me the most happy, like my eyes, too, could shine like stars.

The key burned in my pocket.

“Yeah, maybe,” I said, shrugging. She gave me a hard look, one that made me feel two feet tall. I fought with my hand not to fiddle the key in my pocket. I forced a wider smile. “I mean, yeah, I like working with him. So, who knows, maybe. Like you said, maybe they’ll be back next summer. We’ll see.”

She looked at me for another long moment in the half-dark. A cool mountain breeze blew between us, bringing shivers across my skin. Already my shoulders ached at the thought of the long drive back to Toklat along the Road.

Finally, Molly licked her lips and stepped back. I expected her to tell me goodnight, but instead I watched her eyes trace the lines of my face. “Look, I never told you this really this season, but . . . I’m so glad,” she said, voice barely above a whisper. “That you found him to spend time with . . . that he’s been. . . Well, you know all these years I’ve been bugging you to move out East. And it kills me to think of you alone in your cabin out at Toklat, going on your patrols by yourself. So, knowing you’ve had him to hang out with, it’s made me so happy.” She held up a hand, “And I know it’s none of my damn business, but. . . John, you should keep that,” she finally said. “You should try and hold on to that. Not go through another whole winter so alone.”

And staring into her face, holding my breath, I suddenly understood all the words she wasn’t saying. That it pained her to know that she was my only friend on earth, and that she wasn’t exaggerating in the least when she said she was glad I had someone by my side in my truck that summer.

I swallowed hard as I tried to find the words to say. I was fiercely glad that the darkness was hiding my blush over the fact that I was holding back tears for the second damn time that night.

“Thanks, kid,” I finally said, breath fogging in the air. She nodded once, as if that was all the answer she needed to hear, then glanced towards my truck. “Drive safe,” she said, then she gave me one last wave before closing the cabin door behind her.

Except I didn’t make it back to Toklat until two o’clock in the morning that night, because I spent the next two hours after walking away from Molly’s door lying on my side on the cold kennel ground, with Lugnut sleeping in my arms, and a brass key held so tightly in my hand it left indents on my skin. 

When I opened my cabin door, with sleepy circles under my eyes, and an ache in my shoulders, there was still a warm, damp spot on the front of my shirt from his little nose.

 

\--

 

For all the sleepless nights I spent wondering how to put my plan into action, in the end, it was Sherlock’s idea to take one last grand backpacking trip together. 

He said it so matter-of-factly as we sat across from each other at my little table, hunched over bowls of plain pasta with sauce, as if he didn’t know that I had noticed his eyes just flicker up to the calendar on my wall, tracking the dwindling days left until he supposedly got on a London-bound plane.

I could tell he was expecting me to say I didn’t have enough time – that there were end-of-season reports to write, and the Road Lottery to handle, and covering extra shifts, and that I couldn’t drop everything for two days to go out on a trip with him for no reason.

I clenched my hand against my jeans under the table and nodded. “Yeah, ok,” I said, trying to sound calm. I went back to tastelessly eating mouthfuls of pasta.

I could feel his stare on me from the other side of the table, one eyebrow arched slightly in surprise, but he didn’t say anything more, aside from, “You decide the Unit,” and then he dropped his bowl unceremoniously in the sink and plopped down on the couch with a book to read for the evening. He put his socked feet up on my wall, like he knew I hated, and I could feel his smug grin from clear across the room.

I really should have known then that he had his own plan to enact . . .

But I didn’t know, didn’t realize, and so we set off side-by-side from the camper bus a week later, breathing in the fresh sunrise and shouldering our packs. We were only going to stay out one night in the tundra, just enough to lie out under the clear, open stars, and smell the fresh, soft earth, and feel a little soreness in our muscles. 

Just enough time for me to hold his hand in the tent and beg him not to leave.

That hike out there, that beautiful, shining, hike through the sun and breeze, with the brass key waiting ready in my pocket, I felt like I was the king of the entire world. That I was an eagle resting proudly on the tallest Denali peak, and that I could outstretch my wings, with the wind ruffling through my bones, and leap off and soar through the clear, open skies, tasting the clouds on my tongue, with the pollen dancing around my skin.

I kept Molly’s words in my mind on a loop, the assurances that she had unknowingly transferred straight through to my blood by her touch the other night. That he was my friend, my dearest friend, and that he would want to say yes, and that he would stay. That I couldn’t be the only one who knew that he was more than just a boy to me.

He was vibrating beside me, too, filled with restless energy under the bright sun. He ran his fingers idly over rocks and branches as we passed, caressing the earth with his own touch with every step. There was something brimming in the air, something beautiful and full, and the warmth of it made me constantly shiver down my spine, itching to grab hold of the whole earth with my hands and press it up against my chest. 

That day, I could have done absolutely anything under the sun. I could have survived losing hundreds of James Sholto’s to Baltimore, and hundreds of shotgun blasts, and hundreds of surgical scars on my chest. I could have taken on a grizzly bear with my bare hands and won. I could have looked up at the sky, and puffed out my lungs, and screamed out to the universe that I was sleeping with a man.

And all the while, at the same time, I felt like everything could go up in flames at the smallest spark – explode and incinerate in a cloud of black smoke, disappearing from the face of the earth, with me standing helplessly knee-deep in the rubble and fire all alone.

I ignored that part of my mind, and I breathed in the clean scent of the moss and stream.

“You’re awfully chipper today,” Sherlock huffed under his breath when we were midway through crossing a branch of the river. The icy water thrashed and shoved against our buried calves, threatening to topple us down into the rushing current and soaking our socks and feet.

I hadn’t realized I was smiling as we held on to each other’s shoulders and shuffled sideways across it. I tried to hide my grin as I grunted against a particularly strong section of current. “Yeah, well, it’s a gorgeous day, in a gorgeous place,” I said back lamely. 

He groaned. “Of course, you would say something like that.”

And for some reason, instead of feeling irritated at him, I only laughed, feeling buzzing and lighter than air. “Oh, come on,” I said, as we took our final steps up onto the dry bank, breathing hard. “Look at yourself, you asshole, you’re smiling, too.”

He frowned and put his hands on his hips as sheets of water dripped down from his soaked legs. “I am _not_ smiling,” he said. “I’m soaking wet after crossing that damn river since you wouldn’t allow us to get too close to those moose a mile back, where it would have taken only two-steps to cross instead of thirty-two, and how I’m cold, and my feet are wet, and all you’ve brought to eat is more of your revolting peanut butter and oatmeal. There’s no possible way that I am smiling right now.”

I didn’t respond, but finished changing into my dry socks and re-shouldered my pack, not even waiting for him behind me as I set off. My chest felt warm.

“You are smiling,” I finally said, speaking softly over my shoulder.

I heard him rushing behind me to try and catch up. He never argued back.

-

That night, sitting by the remnants of an oatmeal dinner at our cook site, Sherlock leaned back against my chest between my legs and sighed as I wrapped my arms around him from behind. He sipped slowly at the few fingers of whiskey he’d snuck along in the bottom of his bag, passing the metal flask back and forth to me so we could share. The rim felt warm from the press of his lips, and the whiskey warmed through every inch of my cold blood and bones.

I breathed in his curls, and looked down at his hands, as he looked out ahead of us at the slowly setting summer sun. The earth was painted in soft pink and gold, and the wildflowers blew in the breeze like quilted waves along a shore.

It was one of those moments where I couldn’t believe I was allowed to witness something so beautiful, to be a part of something so perfect and good. Where I wondered what I’d ever done to deserve being chosen for such a scene.

And all the while, that thick, quivering blackness hovered at the corner of my vision – threatening to burn it all before me into ash because it was too beautiful, to ignite it in a deadly spark, to tip me over off the top of the cliff, and I wouldn’t have any feathered wings to catch me as I fell. . .

“You know wolves mate each other for life,” Sherlock suddenly said. His voice was quiet, and yet it sounded like a bomb blast across the still silence of the tundra, echoing across the moss and against the farthest peaks.

It startled me out of my spiraling thoughts, and I clung to the sound of his lungs as they breathed under my arms, pressing back against my chest through the warm line of his spine. I didn’t understand what was happening to me, how I could at one moment be soaring breathlessly through the clouds, and at the next moment be terrified that the air itself would burn my skin. 

He kept talking before I could find any words to respond. 

“Usually, I guess I should say,” he went on. “Most of them do.” I could feel his heartrate quickening beneath his chest. “I used to think that was such a load of shit when I was younger. Back when I first started my research and working with Greg. All the papers said it – all the big names in the field, and yet I couldn’t believe it. The fact that they could be the freest creatures on earth, with nothing to hold them back, and everywhere to go, and they have their whole pack to protect them, and that they’d still choose to stick with only one mate? Forever? Didn’t believe it at all.”

I snorted softly, imagining a young Sherlock Holmes going head to head with an old professor in a stuffy office. “I can imagine that,” I said.

I felt him grin. He leaned back further into my arms. “Anyway, I thought I was going to prove that everyone was wrong. The ultimate tracking project. Me versus the establishment and taking down the man and all that. I was young, remember.”

I smiled and pressed my cheek into his hair. “I know.”

“So I walked out of Greg’s office one day and took a taxi to Heathrow and got on a plane to the nearest location to a place with wolves I could find on the flight board –”

I laughed, “Of course you did –”

“Spent the entire summer avoiding all of Greg’s calls and bumming rides around to different Parks in the States, using up all the savings I’d put away until my brother started funneling me some emergency cash. I checked up on old wolf packs from all the biggest research papers – whether those wolves were still alive, and whether the mates were still together. Kept all my notes written down in about ten spiral notebooks in my bag.”

He paused, then, and I noticed that his voice was getting strained. I waited for him to speak, focusing on the beat of his heart beneath my arms. He shook a little in the breeze, and I wrapped him closer against me. I could imagine it all – his curls, and his young face, his eager eyes scanning the woods with a spiral notebook in his hands. I could see it as if I had been standing there, back when the scars on my chest still hurt when I moved.

“I found this one pair, this alpha male and female who’d been tracked seen together for nearly ten years. Led a pack together around the Northern Rockies mostly. I followed them at a distance for nearly a month. Kept running out of food or water, having to go back to a town and re-supply and then leave to go and hunt them all down again. Utterly ridiculous waste of time –”

“Yeah, survival sure can be a waste of time –”

“You know what I mean. Anyways, I came back out to re-find them one day after I took a weekend off taking a trip out to Denver. I remember it was early, just before sunrise. I was just packing up my tent from the night when I saw something move off in the distance – realized it was the female walking around in a circle. Something was on the ground. Something that wasn’t moving.” 

He paused again, and this time one of his hands reached up to hold my own. His fingers were shaking, and I knew it wasn’t from the cold. “By the time I got close enough to see . . . it was the male. Dead. Shot down in the back of the left shoulder. The female must have caused hell enough that the hunter couldn’t bag it after they brought it down – only reason I could think of why they’d leave the carcass out there in the middle of nowhere. I . . . I watched her stay with him from a distance. For three days. She didn’t . . . leave, for anything. Didn’t leave for food or water, just lay down next to the carcass in the grass.”

“Is that typical?” I asked. My voice sounded too loud.

He shook his head against my chest. “No.”

“Did she --?”

“She died,” he said.

I suddenly felt that the tundra was empty and cold, a huge valley filled with ghosts, and they were silently howling against my skin. I shivered as the last rays of the sun dipped below the peaks, bathing everything around us in shadow and grey. 

“I went back to London after that,” he went on in a whisper. “It was worthless, what I was trying to do. The fact had already been proven.” He lifted his hand before him, moving it as he spoke as if to make a headline. “Wolves Mate for Life – Already Known Fact Proven Again by an Ignorant Kid.”

My chest panged. “What did you do when you got back?”

He sighed through his nose, and it sounded like a laugh at himself. “I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Not even . . . not the death, really. Not that. Just . . . what could be so bloody great about something that would make a wild animal want to die? It didn’t make any sense. There was no logic to it. No . . . no rules.”

I could tell he was holding something back. “So . . .?”

His body felt unnaturally heavy against me. I felt like he was on the cusp of saying something – something important. I held my breath waiting, ears straining for the eventually sound of his quiet voice. I heard my blood beat in my own ears. 

But instead, he only took a deep, long breath after a few silent moments, and he said, “So, wolves mate for life. It’s fact. I’ve just had to accept it.”

I could tell that we were talking about far more than wolves, and the air around us felt fragile, too tense with energy, as if it could crack. “It can be a hard thing to accept,” I said softly, pressing my lips into his hair, and then he was turning in my arms, holding my face in his hands, and he was kissing me, so sweet and softly that it felt like puffs of air against my lips.

It felt like yearning – the sweet, utter longing I’d felt standing on that Seattle pier, for that grey whale to truly see me, and for it to somehow know my name.

“Take me to bed,” he whispered against my lips, and his breath was warm and wet while his fingers stroked my jaw. It made the entire rest of the vast tundra surrounding us fall away, dissolving into the oncoming mist, as if our warm tent at our backs was the only solid place left on the earth. It called out to me, its fabric sides flapping in the soft wind. I wanted to feel nothing but the earth beneath my thighs, and his warm body on top of mine, and his sweet tongue in my mouth, and his hands, the soft hair on his stomach, the muscles of his upper arms . . .

I shoved our cooking supplies into the bear can without cleaning anything off and followed him to the tent, heart in my throat. We were about to do a thing we’d done countless times before, and yet walking in his footsteps, with the key in my pocket, and the echo of his story in my head, I felt that we were about to leap off the tallest cliff side by side, and neither of us would find out if we had wings until after we jumped.

He pulled me down on top of him on the sleeping bags inside, and instantly I was consumed, held down to earth by just the heat of his hands. He held me so tightly I thought my bones would break, and he kissed slowly up my neck, reaching deep into my mouth. 

“John, please,” he whispered against my shaking skin. I tasted his voice. “Please. . .”

I realized something hard was being pressed against my chest. I looked down and saw the cock grasped in his hands, long black straps trailing down onto his stomach and chest.

“Please,” he said again, looking into my eyes.

Everything paused.

I swallowed hard. I didn’t move to touch it. “How did you --?”

“Bottom of my bag,” he said. His voice was breathless.

I stared back down at the unnatural thing in his hands – the thing we’d only ever used a mere handful of times before. There were so many nights, now that it was nearing the end of the season, where we would fall into bed exhausted, and mutter goodnight while just brushing a hand against each other’s arms. There were nights when the slow kisses gradually turned deeper, wetter, more urgent, and Sherlock would roll me on top of him in a heavy embrace, and roll himself against me, and touch me with his palm through my boxers until we both came. 

There were so many nights when I didn’t want to stop and remember – that I couldn’t just effortlessly push inside him without breaking our kiss. That I had to break the thrumming heat between our bodies, and stand up and face the opposite wall of my room as I pulled the cold straps up my legs, and halt everything, leave him alone on the sheets, in order to finally join with his body. 

Those few precious seconds it took me to put it on each time felt like an endless eternity in my mind, awkward and too-silent. I could tell Sherlock understood, that he could see it each time in my eyes, and so more often than not, that cock which had once felt a part of my own skin stayed safely tucked away in a drawer, leaving nothing unnatural and cold between our warm bodies, letting us come together without any pauses where he could suddenly change his mind.

That night, though, as the walls of the tent moaned, and the moss beneath us made the tent floor cool and damp, he begged me with his eyes.

“John,” he whispered, so softly, and yet I feared in that moment that every single Ranger in Denali could hear his voice. He swallowed hard, and his voice was deep and rough. “Please . . . please take it . . . take me –”

I came undone. 

I grabbed the cock from his hands and leaned back on my knees. There wasn’t enough space in the tent for me to stand up and put it on, and I was frantically trying to decide whether to step outside the tent or awkwardly crouch over when Sherlock’s fingers were on the front of my belt, tearing open the buckle. I watched with a dry throat as he yanked open my jeans and shoved them down my thighs.

I quickly looked away.

I couldn’t bear to see the flatness that would be beneath my boxers – not when I hadn’t put the other cock in there that morning since we would be hiking alone all day, and not when my body was currently pulsing, aching to be inside him, and in the deepest part of my mind I was hard, and heavy, and thick, and waiting to pump inside him with my own hot skin.

Not flat.

His wet lips were on my neck, and I hadn’t realized until then that I’d closed my eyes. He kissed beneath my jaw in a warm, slow line. I felt that my blood was about to vibrate out of my own skin – that my lungs would burst, and my heart explode, and I would fall apart in his hands from just the touch of his mouth along my neck.

“Lie down,” he whispered into my skin. It echoed through my bones – an avalanche of ice and rock smashing against the empty valley of myself, filling it with noise where before it had been a void.

I was flat on my back before I could remember deciding to do it, and Sherlock’s heavy body was thrown on top of mine, rolling and warm, and he breathed kisses against my lips. My jeans were somehow completely off my legs, thrown into the corner of the darkening tent, and all I could focus on was the sound of his breath in my ears – the specific weight of his hips that my body was memorizing week by week.

I struggled to breathe. “Do you have . . .?” I tried to ask.

He shook his head, and my heart sank. He was kissing me, and he wanted to be fucked, and we didn’t even have lube for me to open him – open him for a fake cock that he would silently pretend was me . . .

“Don’t need it,” I heard him saying. Before I could question him, he grabbed my hand and shoved it down into his pants beneath his tight pair of briefs. He guided my fingers deeper, lower, until his skin was damp and warm, and I breathlessly reached out to feel his hole as he caressed my mouth with his.

I gasped.

I couldn’t feel his hole – couldn’t feel anything but something hard and round emerging from his body, pressing up beneath my shocked fingertips.

He kissed me more, deeper. I grabbed the warm skin of his ass with my hand, overwhelmed.

“I’m ready for you,” he panted in my ear. He was writhing on top of me, holding me down and surrounding me and flinging me up towards the sky.

Stroking my hair.

“I’m stretched for you. Please, John. God, please, do it . . . take it –”

I couldn’t even believe what was happening. I nodded, eyes still closed, and his sigh of relief washed over my skin like a wave. He kissed through my beard, down the side of my neck, sucking my skin. The cock was lying beside me on the sleeping bag, waiting for me to put it on, and suddenly Sherlock’s hands were on the waistband of my boxers, starting to pull. I clutched at his back as his muscles shifted beneath my hands. I groaned and gulped down air.

“Sherlock,” was all I could say.

He rubbed his cheek across my chest through my shirt, moaning at the feel of me shaking beneath him. And I _was_ shaking, and wet, and vibrating out of my skin. Filled with rolling heat and desperate to be inside him, pulsing inside his body, filling him with myself. Desperate to press him down into the earth. And he was _open_ for me, had stretched himself, was kissing me like I was oxygen itself, and he wanted me, he wanted . . .

I realized too late that my boxers were moving down off my waist, dragging down across my pubic hair, down towards the tops of my thighs.

In one blinding second, every moment of my entire life coalesced. 

He had never seen me there before, not without my boxers, not without the cock already strapped on. He had never seen the bare skin with his eyes. Nobody on the entire earth had.

I turned to ice.

“Stop,” I said, too softly for him to hear. He kept licking my neck, sighing into my skin, pulling my boxers down, down, down.

I grabbed his wrist with too much force. “ _Stop_ ,” I said again. Maybe I yelled. Maybe I screamed.

His hands fled from my body faster than I could blink. He immediately sat back and froze, and both of us held our breaths. My boxers were still pulled down around my thighs, leaving me bare and exposed, and the air in the tent was so thick I was afraid I would roll over and throw up.

I couldn’t breathe.

“John?” I finally heard him whisper, and he sounded so small, so hurt, so scared, so confused, and I wondered if I had left a bruise on his wrist from my hand.

My eyes burned in the corners, and the tent ceiling above me turned to hazy water.

“I’m sorry,” I heard myself choke out, and then I was pushing him aside, yanking my boxers back up my legs, grabbing my wrinkled jeans from the corner. 

I had to get out. I would suffocate if I stayed in the tent. I would wither and die – I would disintegrate and collapse.

My heart was painfully pounding in my chest as I crawled through the tent door and stood up on shaking legs. The wide-open tundra mocked me as I struggled to pull my jeans back on, nearly falling over in the wet moss. My bare feet clung to the earth so I wouldn’t fall.

I walked blindly away from the tent, making my way further into the empty dark. The wind slapped ice against my clammy skin and poured sweat down my spine. I thought of Sherlock sitting alone back in the tent, half-undressed and disheveled, with an erect, disembodied cock lying on a sleeping bag beside him, and a plug still in his ass.

The memory of the confused, shattered, terrified look on his face when I told him to stop made my throat burn with acid.

When I was far enough away that I could forget the tent existed, I stopped, and wrapped my arms around my chest, and tried to force myself to breathe. My lungs were still tense and shaking, and my heart sat heavily down in my stomach like lead. 

And I thought, as I looked out at the endless grey fog, and tried not to fall down helpless on my face, of that one night I’d been back in a bar in Rapid City when I was seventeen – a different bar from the one where I’d heard about the clinic all the way in New York City. A usual bar. A normal bar. Not one for men like me.

I remembered how I’d hidden in the corner with my baseball cap pulled down too low, and my long hair draped beneath it around my shoulders, and a too-large flannel to hide my chest. With my hands wrapped tightly around a beer. Nobody had even noticed I was there.

There had been a commotion at the door, raised voices and a wooden chair smashing to the ground. I’d turned just in time, with my face still hidden in the shadow of my cap, to see a woman being shoved towards the door by a group of men. They were yelling words at her I’d never heard, names I’d never even heard anyone be called.

“ _Fucking tranny!_ ” one of them screamed, and they reached out to try and rip her beautiful dress down off her shoulder. There was chaos. Yelling, and shattered glasses, and one high-pitched scream, until the whole group had been forced outside by the other people in the bar – old oil workers with callused fingers trying to avoid going back home, and teenage boys eyeing the bar girl in high-heeled cowboy boots. And everyone went back to their drinks, to the calm drone of the jukebox in the corner playing an old country song, and their lukewarm Coors on the sticky tables waiting to be gulped down.

Two weeks later, I snuck back out to Rapid City, leaving behind my parents sloshed drunk in separate rooms, and I’d sat at the same stool, in the same corner, with the same beer. I listened, and I eventually found out through the grapevine of gossip that that woman from a couple weeks ago was run out of town or dead. Only they hadn’t used the word ‘woman.’ No chance in hell.

And I’d sat up for hours later that night in the attic with my head held in my hands. I’d wondered why the hell I somehow felt responsible for it all. Like I should have rushed towards them all, and thrown myself in front of her, and screamed out that she was just like me. As if the sight of me, just a seventeen-year-old girl with an ugly shirt and a cap pulled down too low, could have somehow frozen them all in their tracks, and stopped them from ripping her silk dress out in the snow.

I had no idea how much time had passed since I’d fled from the tent. I realized that a part of me was waiting to hear Sherlock’s footsteps padding out into the moss. I was waiting for him to follow me, to join me out in the darkness, and to touch my arm.

But that sound never came. 

He stayed back in the tent, and eventually I looked over my shoulder to see that he’d shut off the little lantern light. I couldn’t decide whether I was fiercely glad he hadn’t joined me, or gutted that he didn’t.

Fear still curdled like thick poison in my gut as I stood, as if someone had poured mud from the nearby stream straight down my throat. When my feet finally grew numb from standing out barefoot in the cold, I turned back to the tent, finding my way in the foggy dark. An odd pang spread through my chest when I unzipped the tent flap and saw that Sherlock was still inside, as if I was subconsciously afraid that he would have disappeared off into the night, with his belongings strapped to his back and the cock lying alone in the middle of the tent floor – his goodbye note without even having to write down a word.

But he was still there, and the cock was nowhere to be seen, and I couldn’t tell, as I settled down beside him in my bag, if he was even asleep or just pretending to be. His body didn’t stir. I got into my bag as quietly as I could, leaving on my jeans and belt even though I knew I would regret it in the morning. My bare feet slowly thawed in the warmth of my bag, and I clenched my toes as the prickling needles spread through my feet just so I could feel anything at all.

Long minutes later, when I finally allowed myself to turn my head to look over at Sherlock’s back, I choked back a sob like I’d never experienced before in my life. He was right there, inches in front of me, and yet he was a million miles away. There were endless chasms between us – more insurmountable than a wingless bird flying straight up to Denali’s peak.

I wondered what he’d looked like when he eased the plug out of himself and put the cock away in his bag all alone in the tent. If he had been furious at me, or hurt, or scared of the way I’d shoved him off me when I fled from the tent.

If he had understood it at all, or if he understood it better than even me.

I wondered these things, watching his lungs rise and fall in the dark, and I suddenly fiercely hated the skin between my legs, and the scars on my chest, and the smallness of my hands. I hated my name, and my dad, and the sound of that woman’s dress ripping all those decades ago in the bar. Hated that I’d just felt the same blinding fear with Sherlock Holmes that I’d felt that night in the alley in Talkeetna my first winter, with whiskey on my lips, and drying semen on my palm, and that nameless man’s hand unknowingly reaching for the buckle of my belt.

I hated the memory of Sherlock’s gentle bones cracking under my hand when I’d grabbed his wrist too hard as he tried to kiss my skin.

And I hated myself, more fiercely than I had even when I was fourteen, when I was tearing out clumps of my long hair in the attic with my bare hands and throwing it down onto the floor. 

I hated myself until I thought I would pass out, and I memorized the shape of his body, the smell of his sweat, and the sound of his breaths, then I closed my eyes and drifted wearily to sleep, aching somewhere deep inside.

-

Sherlock was gone when I opened my eyes the next morning.

I expected it.

It still hurt though. Fuck, it hurt. The pain gripped me in my lungs and refused to let me move. I clutched my hands into fists inside my sleeping bag, pressing hard against my stomach. It felt like I’d been punched straight in the face, tackled to the ground by a grizzly, dragged miles and miles from the back of a truck.

I forced open my eyes, not realizing I’d squeezed them shut, and my vision slowly focused on something next to me in the tent – something shoved into the corner by my feet.

His bag.

I shot up, heart pounding, and before I could even open my mouth, I heard a gentle voice from the other side of the tent door.

“I’m just out here, John,” the voice said, his beautiful voice. “I’ve got coffee ready, come out here.”

His words washed over me like cool, fresh water. The fire in my limbs evaporated, and the roar in my heart softened to a whisper. I crawled out of my bag slower than I needed to. I felt like a fool – knowing that he had heard me panic when I woke up, that he knew I had expected him to be gone. That I needed him to assure me of his presence like a child afraid of the dark.

I finally ducked out of the tent and joined him sitting on a patch of flat rock just outside. He handed me the Stanley of instant coffee without looking my way when I sat down, but he placed his hand for a moment, just one small moment, on my thigh.

That was what did it.

Relief like I’d never felt before in my life suddenly flooded through my chest, punching the air from my lungs and slamming me in the face with a burst of cool breeze. 

It was a more powerful relief than the one I’d felt that moment I looked in the hospital mirror and saw my flat chest for the first time. More intense and revolutionary than the one I’d felt buttoning up my very first uniform shirt, or when my eyes saw Denali’s peak emerging through the clouds for the first time. More than that first, breathless moment Lugnut had leapt up into my arms.

Sherlock was still there, he hadn’t left, and he was reaching out to touch me, to hand me my coffee, to let me know that it was alright, that he somehow understood, and that I hadn’t scared him away.

I looked quickly down at the wrist I’d grabbed the night before. I hadn’t left any bruises.

With water in my eyes I started reaching into my pocket. My fingers gripped the key, warm from my skin, and I held it in my palm, slowly stroking it with my thumb.

And I realized, as I opened my mouth to say his name, that his name tasted sweeter than the first time I ever opened my lips to whisper “John,” lying on the little bed my dad built in the airless attic, his old sock shoved down my pants to create a bulge.

I took a deep breath and turned to face him, glowing and beautiful in the fresh morning sun.

“Sherlock,” I said. He turned his head to look at me and raised his eyebrows. I caught my breath at the perfect lines of his mouth. His eyelashes reflecting the sun. 

“Let’s . . . let’s stay out another night,” I told him, feeling like I was begging. I kept talking before he had the chance to interrupt and tell me I was insane, that he would never want to stay out there another unplanned night, not with me, not after what happened last night –

“We have . . . there’s plenty of food for us for another night,” I said, “and I can filter some water a little ways up this creek. Weather should hold up fine. I don’t have a real shift tomorrow, just Lottery prep. I just . . .” I paused, unsure how to even put it into words – that I couldn’t have my last night out in the wilderness with him be tainted by what had happened the night before. That I wanted to try again, give myself another chance, feel his skin for one more night in the warm air of a tent instead of my cabin, to re-do it all.

And, to my surprise, he didn’t shoot back any arguments at all. 

“Yes,” he agreed, with an odd look in his eyes as if he couldn’t believe his luck. I smiled at him, and I let him see my wet eyes. 

“Okay,” I whispered back. I nodded as I secretly slipped the key back into my pocket. It could wait until the next morning – the next perfect morning with him lying in my arms. “Okay,” I said again, and he smiled back at me before kissing my coffee-warmed lips.

So we stayed out that second day. We didn’t go back.

It was the most perfect day I could have ever dreamed. It was the sort of day I used to imagine I could have one day if I became a Ranger – where the entire vast world was right at my feet, waiting to be explored and discovered and touched. 

I lead Sherlock, and Sherlock lead me. We sat together in the shade for long hours watching some moose cross over the hills, and he talked me into scrambling up some scree just so we could slide down from the top. The entire day, he was right there, warm and sturdy by my side. And once, just once, I caught him smiling at me when he thought I couldn’t see.

That night, in the tent pitched on a bluff overlooking snow-capped peaks, I pulled him into my arms and held him close against my chest. He melted against me, sighing deep into my own bones. There was warmth between us, something thrumming with possibility in the air caught between my chest and his – between our entwined thighs.

I pressed my lips into his curls and breathed in the scent of a day’s worth of sweat and sun. 

“Sherlock, I’m . . .” I started to whisper. I swallowed hard. “Last night, I didn’t mean to . . . It wasn’t . . . Sherlock, I’m so –”

“You don’t have to say anything,” he said. He pushed up quickly onto his elbow and looked down at my face. His fingers twitched by my cheek, as if they were going to stroke my face, or brush my hair behind my ear. I hid my flinch, thinking of the barn, of the hot field in the sun . . . but then he clenched his hand into a fist, and moved to reach down and grip my shoulder instead. I relaxed. 

And I wanted, in that moment, to say anything and everything to him. 

I wanted to ask him if he understood how impossibly unbelievable it was that he understood how to touch me, and where to put his hand. If he could read in the lines of my body the entire story of the alleyway behind the Talkeetna bar. If he could see how revolutionary it was that he knew the truth of what was beneath my boxers, without even having seen it with his own eyes, and that he still begged for me to enter him, and still let me mark him with my beard. That he still called me John without any hesitation at all.

“John,” I heard. He moved his hand to grip my upper arm, and I blinked up into his concerned face. “John, you don’t have to say anything about it,” he said again.

The forbidden words all hovered on the tip of my tongue for a breathless moment.

I swallowed them away.

I nodded, then reached for his face and brought his mouth to mine. He moaned against me, a sound that was desire and relief all mixed into one. He was heavy, and he was warm, and the vibrations of his heartbeat rattled straight through into my own lungs and chest.

“Let me,” I panted. “Let me . . . please –”

“Christ yes,” he breathed. He pushed off me so my own shaking hands could reach for the zipper of his pack in the corner, yanking out the cock without hesitation. He flung himself onto his back and started shoving off his pants while I tore off my own clothes beside him. I crouched on my knees facing away from him, refusing to feel embarrassed, as I awkwardly maneuvered the straps up over my thighs and around my waist. I could hear him panting behind me, touching himself and writhing on the fabric of the sleeping bags, filling the tent with the sound of his body – the sound of his want for me.

I heard the cap to something click, and the hiss of his breath as his fingers entered himself. 

He didn’t say anything at all when I pulled my boxers back on over the cock, letting it stand erect out through the hole in the fabric. He didn’t even hesitate, didn’t blink, when I turned back to face him with a question on my face – silently asking if he understood why I needed to, why I couldn’t be bare now, not just yet.

He understood.

He grabbed my thighs and pulled me down on top of him, laughing when my nose crashed into his as I lost my balance. And we laughed together, moaned and sighed, as we joined, and my body finally pressed into his. My _own_ body, my own skin and bone, and in my mind, I was filling him with the heat of myself as he cursed and begged.

I fucked him. We had sex. 

Two things I never thought in a thousand years I would be able to say about my own life.

When I eventually came, after a very long time moving slowly together, breathing each other’s air, there were beads of sweat dripping down my bare back. The air in the tent tasted of his wet lips, the sounds of his sighs, and my eyes were fixed looking down at the place where my cock was pumping into his open body. 

It was intoxicating, the sight of me emerging from my boxers – no hint of black straps to be seen. He was stretched around me, aching, pulling me freely into himself. 

And it was more breathtaking, more beautiful, than the reflection of the sunrise off the back of that gray whale. It left me more awestruck than the sight of the endless Death Valley stars. 

-

In the morning my thighs were sore, and my body felt glorious and strong and fucked. 

I cracked my toes in the bottom of my sleeping bag and flexed my feet, reveling in the soreness throughout the muscles in my legs. Then I reached a tired hand out of the warmth of my sleeping bag and rummaged around for my jeans, trying to retrieve the key. 

_”Come with me to my cabin,_ ” I was going to whisper to him as he woke up in my arms. “ _Stay here with me, just a few days, a few weeks, a few months. Come back to me next year. Let’s keep, let’s keep on. . .“_

My hand found my jeans. I was going to tell him that he was better than the darkness in my little attic, and more beautiful than Denali’s clear peak in the melting sun. That I wanted him to stay, stay in my life, and keep sleeping between my sheets, and make my cabin in Talkeetna smell of only peppercorn and cedar. And sex. 

How I wanted him to be with me. And I with him.

I jumped when his hand was suddenly on my arm, pulling me away from the pile of clothes in the corner of the tent and yanking me on top of his body, sleeping bag and all.

I frowned. “Sherlock –”

“Morning,” he said, in the deepest voice I had ever heard. He arched his back and pressed his hips up into me, and even through two layers of sleeping bags, I could feel him hard as steel – wanting and warm. He reached his hand down into my bag and stroked my bare skin beneath the layers of shirts I had thrown on in the middle of the cold night. My skin shivered beneath his fingertips. My ribs ached.

The key could fucking wait just fifteen more minutes.

“Fuck,” I whispered. He grinned up at me, and his curls spilled wildly across the flannel liner in his bag. “Exactly,” he said back, and then he kissed me until I couldn’t breathe.

An hour later, I crawled out of the tent to join him where he’d been making our coffee and waiting for me to get dressed. The sun was shining a beautiful, brilliant gold, and the sky was an endless blue, and the snow on the mountain peaks glittered like stars. The air smelled of wildflowers and cheap coffee and sex.

My breath filled my lungs and puffed out my chest. I didn’t even allow myself to hesitate when I finally reached his side. 

“Sherlock, there’s something –" I started to say, but he looked at me at the exact same moment, with a warm glow in his eyes, and he said, “I think you’ll grow to really like London.”

The words died in my mouth. I stared at him, mouth half-open. A strange warning zipped up my spine, causing my palm wrapped around the key to start to sweat.

“What?” I finally said, barely a sound carried on my breath.

He looked at me as if I’d somehow grown a second head. “London, John. You’ll grow to love it, I think, once you get settled in.”

I was in one of those dreams – those dreams where you run, and run, and run, but your body never moves, always stuck in slow motion and tar, and you end up five steps behind where you even began.

“London,” I said, not even a question.

“Yes, London.”

I opened my mouth and closed it a few times before speaking again. I felt ten-years-old.

“When I visit?”

Sherlock frowned, then, and finally fully turned to face me, coffee half-halted on the way to his mouth. He spoke to me slowly, as if I wouldn’t otherwise understand anything he was saying. “When you move there with me,” he said, still frowning. “After this season.”

“Move there with you?!” I said back, heart racing. 

And then his face fell. The light that had been glowing warm in his eyes when he said the word ‘London’ withered and died. The hand holding his coffee dropped back down to his side.

I stood there, stunned, and watched the emotions flash across his face: realization, then annoyance, then something that looked a lot like disappointment.

“Oh,” he said, turning away from me. He nodded, frowning now at himself, as if there was something he should have realized much sooner. “I see. You weren’t expecting this.”

The hair on the back of my neck stood on end, and I thought my heart would explode out of my chest. My limbs were frozen. 

“How the fuck could I have expected this?” I finally asked, knowing my voice was far too loud.

He laughed, but it sounded strange and harsh coming out of his mouth. “Don’t tell me you were actually expecting to spend this whole winter alone back in your cabin,” he said, and even though his tone was gentle, there was something underneath it, something brewing and frantic. “You’ve obviously been wanting to tell me something important for weeks now. I can practically see whatever it is on the tip of your tongue before you go and ignore it, or change the subject. You were dreading going back to that place this winter anyways, dreading my plane ticket to leave, and our conversation about it kept getting delayed due to your inability to start the conversation with me and ask that I take you along. Therefore, I’ve taken care of everything. It’s all already done. We’re set to go.”

“Set to go?” I repeated, feeling like an idiot and a robot and a child all at once. 

I watched him hold back his sigh. “Yes, John. Set to go. Your job’s been given notice, your ticket is bought, you’ve three interviews lined up for you with conservation groups back in London, and our housing is set.” He paused and took a deep breath, and I saw a strange look pass across his face, one that looked small and hurt.

“Honestly, I thought you’d be pleased,” he finished.

I shook my head against my will and took a step back. “I can’t . . . I can’t just move there with you,” I heard myself say. The earth was starting to tilt beneath my feet. “Jesus, Sherlock, what the fuck are you even thinking –”

“Look, it’s a waste of time standing here arguing about it when we both know what’s going to happen,” he shot back, and I could hear the irritation steadily growing in his voice. “You cannot honestly tell me that this isn’t what you wanted – what you were going to ask me for –”

“But this is my home!” I cried. My chest was heaving beneath my shirt, which felt tight and constricting across my skin. “I can’t just . . . I can’t just quit and –”

“And what? Start living? Start allowing yourself to be in the world?”

I didn’t know what to say. I felt that Sherlock Holmes was nothing but a mirage just in front of me, turning into smoke and slipping through my frantic fingers – taking away the tundra and the Denali range along with him. Taking away my uniform . . . the buttons from that first uniform shirt . . .

“This is my _home_ ,” I said again, voice too high. “That cabin is my home –”

“That cabin is your hideout, not your home,” he spat back, as if it was a truth that everyone on earth understood but me.

Instantly I thought of building that cabin ten years ago with my bare hands, log by log, nail by nail, until the calluses on my hands looked exactly like the calluses on my dad’s that day he built my bed for me up in the attic, when he showed me how to hold the drill, and steadied my arms with his hands, and said “ _That’s it, Ranger. Good, just like that_. . .”

I held back the “fuck you” hovering in my mouth and said the first other words that came to mind instead. “What the fuck makes you think that this is ok? That I was asking you for this? I mean, my fucking _job_ , Sherlock, my _house_ , Jesus –”

“What makes me think this? How do I know? I’ll tell you how I know, John,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest. He looked one-hundred feet tall. “You clench your fists and stare off into the distance whenever someone mentions the end of the season; Molly Hooper told Geoffrey who told me that you looked like you just found out somebody died when you told her you figured you’d just spend the winter like usual in your cabin; you have tried to tell or ask me something important approximately fourteen times in the past four weeks without actually saying the goddamn thing; you didn’t actually go to the office to do paperwork that day you left a few weeks ago after we took Lugnut outside the Park, but you did, in fact, drive out of the Park, judging by the mud that was left on the tires, and I can only assume it had something to do with possibly selling your cabin since you came back empty handed except for an important piece of paper folded up in your pocket; you love when I tell you about London; your face sags whenever you have to leave in the morning to go out on another boring patrol; you –”

“Stop it,” I said, flashing back to that same word leaving my mouth two nights ago in the tent. “Just stop it. You will not deduce me like this, you don’t _get_ to deduce me –”

“Don’t get to?” Sherlock lifted his hands towards the sky and nearly laughed. “John, how the hell do you think I _knew_ without deducing you? Tell me that?”

“Fuck,” I breathed. I turned my back to him and grabbed the back of my neck with my hands, breathing up heavily towards the sky. Clouds were slowly rolling in, hiding the sun and bathing the tundra in shadow. Icy wind shivered across my skin even as a bead of cold sweat dripped down my back.

“Fuck,” I whispered again. 

I heard him sigh behind me, and I shivered again at the hopelessness in the sound.

“I don’t understand, John,” I heard him say in a soft voice. “You . . . you want this, you can’t tell me you’d rather . . . for me to go, and you to stay here. All the signs point to –”

And God, how I wanted to just throw the key at him right then, to explain how wrong he was, how all I wanted on earth was to keep being by his side, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t, because . . .

“My job, Sherlock,” I said, voice shaking. “You put in my notice for my fucking _job_. My – my life. . . I _am_ a Ranger, my entire life, and you just –”

“You’re being irrational, John,” he said, fire back in his voice. I turned towards him, standing ten feet away, and I braced my legs into the earth as if I was about to survive a grizzly attack. Before I could even form words in my head to respond, he kept going, “You don’t need to live here out in the middle of nowhere anymore. That isn’t who you really are. You’re _better_ than this –”

“How the fuck do you know who I really am?” I somehow grunted out. “That this isn’t me?”

His face twisted in disbelief, “Because you’ve just been hiding away from the real world out here!” he yelled. He reached up to grip his curls in his fists. “Keeping yourself hidden away so you won’t have to get close to another human being!”

His words punched me in the gut and burned in my eyes. I saw myself, as if from above, that night after I sprinted away from the man in the alley, when I’d sat in my cabin all alone in the freezing dark, and wished, just wished, that someone could have come, that anybody could have stayed. Wished for it so desperately that I cried more tears than I did that morning my dad hefted the shotgun and hissed, “ _You’re no fucking daughter of mine._ ”

Somehow I was taking steps towards him in the moss, nearly tripping on the uneven rock, and my shaking hand was reaching out to press into his chest. 

My voice broke, “You, of all fucking people, Sherlock Holmes, do not get to make me feel ashamed. Not you. Not you of all people.” I pressed my finger harder into his chest, until his heartbeat smashed wildly against my skin. “I will not be fucking ashamed of who I am, of how --”

“Of course this isn’t about being ashamed,” he cut in. I’d never seen him look so exasperated – so wide-eyed and desperate. “Christ, John, this is about finally _living_. Being a part of the real world, with me. We can be together. You want to move to London with me.”

“I am _not_ moving to London –”

“You don’t need all of this anymore, not now that –”

“This is my fucking _home_ \--”

“You don’t have to keep hiding, keep –”

“This is my life! I’m not fucking hiding –"

“John, you can be free –”

“Be free?!”

I suddenly wished, more than anything on the entire earth, that I had the cock between my legs. Just one thing to make me feel right, to make me feel whole, and not like my soul was currently being sucked painfully out of my chest, out from between my heaving ribs. Sucked out through the scars.

My hands flailed wildly out towards the distant horizon, slowly darkening under the thickening sea of grey clouds. “This is the only fucking place on the fucking earth where I am free,” I said. I angrily wiped a tear off my cheek with my forearm. “How can you not . . .Fuck, you’re taking it away from me –”

“I’m taking it away from you?” Sherlock’s red-rimmed eyes looked up towards the sky, and he groaned in frustration. “John, you’re taking it away from yourself. I’m trying to _help_ you, if you would just listen –”

“So, what?” I heard myself yell. We were somehow back to standing ten feet apart, chests panting, and the entire world was black except for the fierce whites of his eyes. “So you just looked around and picked the most broken Ranger you could find? Someone to fix as your summer project so you wouldn’t get too bored between finding your fucking wolves?”

The look on his face sucked the breath from my lungs. He was confused, and hurt, and standing all alone with the entire range of Denali at his back. He was terrifying, and he was beautiful, and it made me want to sink to my knees and weep.

He was furious.

It made me want to scream – to reach out and smash Denali to rubble with my bare hands.

“Yes!” I heard him scream. Only half-a-second had passed since my question, and I felt like I was being ripped through the fog of a dream, where the ground was the sky, and everything was too loud. “Yes!” he was screaming, with his hands clenched in his curls, “Are you honestly saying you would have been happier if I’d left you alone?”

For one second, one blinding second, the entire earth was silent and still – nothing moved, nothing at all, except for his words echoing across the empty valley, hissing through the rocks and grass, sinking down into the deep.

I shattered.

The pain of my heart breaking was unprecedented. I doubled over, as if I’d just been punched, and I saw myself from far away, a pathetic man and a fool, who’d had the answer to his happiness in his pocket for weeks and been too afraid to take it out into the light. A man who was not even a man, not according to everyone on earth, not according to anyone except the man standing before me, screaming at me, with tears in his eyes because of my words.

Who’d just taken away my life, so swiftly and easily it was like my life had never existed at all.

I was just John Watson, no longer a Ranger, world’s biggest fool, who’d thought I had finally found happiness, and instead I was just a puzzle to keep a beautiful genius from getting too bored.

Who’d taken off my clothes, left the lights on, let him see me. Who’d thought that he would leave London, stay in a boring one-room cabin, somehow, for some goddamn reason, stay with _me_. . .

I sucked in a breath, stunned. I needed to leave. Needed to get off that fucking bluff and away from the tundra and back to the Road. Needed air that didn’t smell like his sweat and the hints of his cologne buried in the folds of his fucking shirt.

“John, wait.”

I shook my head. I took two steps back while I watched his face crumble, and his voice shook like a flame on the verge of being blown out. “John, believe me, I didn’t mean it like that,” he begged me. A tear slid down his cheek, and I looked away. “You know that’s not at all what I meant.”

I turned back to the tent with numb legs, then sank hard to my knees and crouched inside to grab my pack. I shoved the clothes and supplies I had lying around the tent haphazardly inside, not even rolling up my sleeping bag or caring about the tent itself. My fingers were shaking so fiercely I couldn’t even get the zipper back up.

And all the while, behind me, a steady stream of his voice. “John, please, that’s not what I meant. . . that’s not what I was trying to say . . . Don’t -- John, _please_ \--”

I heaved myself to my feet, barely keeping myself from falling back into the grass. I couldn’t look at him. I walked straight past him, with my eyes at my feet, and I heard him trying to breathe, struggling to form words.

“John wait,” he was pleading. “John, don’t – Wait! I didn’t mean it, please wait!”

His hand touched my shoulder, and it burned my skin so fiercely I shrugged him off. “I can’t do this, Sherlock,” I said, barely forming his name with my lips. I kept walking towards the horizon, towards the emptiness of the park.

“John,” I heard him say, so small and broken, so unbelievably sad.

It sounded exactly the same way my sister had called me, decades ago. When she’d stood on the porch, with a baby in each arm, and stood next to my mom lying crying on the front steps, and my dad chasing me out in the yard.

She’d called me a different name – different sounds leaving her tongue.

But it had sounded exactly the same.

And just like I had all those decades ago, I didn’t stop and look back. I kept going. Walking this time, instead of sprinting, but leaving all the same.

“This is my life,” I whispered back over my shoulder, not even sure if he could hear.

His voice carried to me on the breeze, shaking and wet. “Fuck,” he said. It tore straight through my chest – searing through my blood, snapping the bone.

I couldn’t look back at him. “Fuck,” he whispered again.

I kept walking, for what felt like ten days and ten seconds at the same time. And all the time, with each numb step, I waited to hear footsteps running up behind me. Waited to hear the one word I hadn’t yet heard from his lips - _sorry_. I waited for me to shake my head, and forget it all, and run back to him with open arms.

Then I remembered his face when he’d spoken of London. The warm light in his eyes, the excitement in his hands. The way that every inch of his body had lit up with purpose, with joy, with an emotion I’d never even seen on his face when he looked at me in the sunrise light of a tent.

I remembered the way that warmth had died when I told him that this place was my home.

And so I kept walking, one step after another after another, for what felt like years.

I kept walking, and I never heard footsteps running up behind me.

I walked in a fog, thinking of everything and nothing all at once – hearing nothing but the sound of my feet, the air of my breaths, the shifting of my pack. Rain fell, a pathetic mist that drenched my hair and dripped down into my eyes.

I thought of nothing, and I walked, and somehow, hours later, my fingers gripped the handle of my Toklat cabin door. I wrenched it open and hurled myself inside, desperate to get in unless it disappeared into smoke right before my eyes – as if whatever Sherlock had told my bosses, whatever paperwork he’d filed about my job, would make the door not open to my touch, impenetrable and locked. 

But it opened for me, and I collapsed inside, and I sunk to my knees on the hard wood with my pack thudding to my side.

My cabin was utterly silent. 

No bare feet padding on the wood, no other pair of breathing lungs. A dark curly hair was blown by my breath across the empty floor. 

And I suddenly wished, as the pain burned in my chest, and my eyes stung with hot, disbelieving tears, that I could pick up a phone, cradle it to my ear, dial, and call my dad. 

My dad, who had probably told everyone for the past two decades that I was dead, and who might even be dead himself, and who, for the first time in my entire life, didn’t stand in the way so my mom wouldn’t slap me that one morning, that one fateful morning.

My dad who came home drunk one night from his own dad’s funeral, and the next morning let five-year-old me pretend to use his razor with him in the little trailer bathroom – who covered my face in shaving cream, and said “ _Now, don’t tell your momma_ ,” and let me shave it all off, guiding my fingers with his own hand.

My dad. 

I wanted to call him, hear his voice over the phone, no matter what name he called me back, just to hear him say, “ _Chin up, now, don’t be scared, come on. . ._ ”

I could tell him I had lost him, lost everything, that it was all over, that I had been stupid and naïve. That nothing had been real.

And even though I apparently no longer worked for a National Park, he would still call me Ranger.

But I couldn’t call him, would never call him again, hadn’t called him for twenty goddamn years, and the pain of that was somehow sharper than what I’d felt walking away from Sherlock Holmes back out in the rainy moss, with his whispered curses like ghosts haunting the empty air behind me.

I leaned back against the door and covered my face with my hands.

I don’t know how long I stayed like that, hunched over on the floor with rain dripping from my soaked clothes. I felt that the whole world would laugh at me, then, if they peeked through my cabin windows and saw me in that state – a grown man, a _Ranger_ , reduced to slumping on the floor over another man’s words.

Another man’s lips, lips which had kissed me, had said the words, “ _You are, I know, I know_ ,” and that same man’s lips had now furiously crumpled and yelled the word, “ _Yes!_ ”

And then it hit me all at once, a raging, blaring panic which screamed like fire up my spine:

I shouldn’t have left him out there.

Horrific images flashed through my mind. He could be hurt, or lost, or unable to carry back the supplies I left behind. He could be wandering alone through the fog, unable to find the Road, with not enough water. He could fall into a river, slide down loose scree, walk straight into a bear and end up in pieces torn on the ground.

My heart lurched. My throat went dry.

I was just about to leap to my feet and throw open the door to search for him when I heard voices out in the pathway up to the cabins.

“Holmes!” Nick’s voice called out.

My heart stopped, and I froze. Relief panged sharply in my chest even as another emotion flooded hotly through my veins. 

“Holmes, what the hell? Where the fuck is Watson? Weren’t you two out together? Supposed to be back yesterday?”

Then I heard another voice, that too-familiar voice, the voice I heard every night in my dreams. The voice I heard in the warm spaces between my sheets, whispered across my bare skin, hidden in the golden palms of every sunset valley.

The voice I would never hear that way again.

I heard that voice say back, completely normal and calm, “Watson’s already back in his cabin, no need to worry. I requested we stay out another night to conduct extra research when we came across fresh tracks. He wanted to be rested for his shift tomorrow and headed back early. Few hours ago.”

My fists were clenched in my lap, and I realized I had pressed my ear up against my front door to listen. I couldn’t move.

“Strange,” Nick was saying, “Never known him to abandon you when you’re in the thrill of the chase before – you must’ve dragged him around real good for him to be tired enough to head back.”

I heard Sherlock breathe, an odd sound from his nose. “Something like that.”

“Look here, now I have you,” and Nick’s voice grew fainter as he took a few steps away from my cabin, closer to Sherlock. “Been meaning to ask you when I should meet with Watson to finalize his paperwork for his notice and all that –”

Sherlock interrupted him, saying something I couldn’t hear for a second, before Nick cut in, “I know, I know, you had your own plan and all, but that ain’t how it works. You’re a smart enough man to know I can’t accept a notice without the actual person handing it in –”

More words I couldn’t hear. I pressed my ear harder against the door, heart in my throat.

“Really, now?” Nick said louder. “You sure? . . . . Well, you just seemed so sure of it a week ago, but I can’t say I’m sad that he’ll be sticking around. Was gonna be damn hard to replace a Ranger like him, let me tell you.”

Nick laughed then, his usual laugh, and I heard a sound as if he thumped Sherlock on the back.

“You tell him from me he’s all good, then. We’ll just pretend it never happened,” Nick was saying. I heard his boots crunch in the dirt as he started to walk away.

“Of course,” Sherlock said, still sounding perfectly normal, so perfectly calm.

And it occurred to me, with my ear pressed to the rough wood of my cabin door, that I never thought the saddest words I’d ever hear in my life would be Sherlock Holmes telling Nick that I wasn’t actually going to quit my job.

Nick was gone, but I hadn’t heard another set of footsteps walk away. Sherlock was standing there, I knew, just a few feet from my cabin porch, standing still in the dirt.

I held my breath. 

I waited, desperately waited, for his footsteps to grow louder in the dirt. For his feet to pad up the stairs, avoiding the spots in the wood he knew would creak, and for his hand to knock on the door, for his fingers to pick the lock, for him to pull me into his arms and call me John. Ask me what was for dinner.

I waited for what felt like hours, and I wondered if he could somehow tell that I was sitting slumped against the door, collapsed on the wood like a child, unable to do anything or stand. If he knew that the rain was still dripping down my neck from my solo hike back.

He moved, just one step. I tensed. I couldn’t tell if he’d moved towards or away from my front door.

For one blinding, fierce moment, I wanted to leap to my feet and throw myself outside. I wanted to run towards his body, tell him I was sorry, that none of this had to happen, that we could forget everything we just said. 

Anything to have one last moment in his arms, one last kiss which I now knew I would never have, one last embrace. But maybe, if I just went out there, if I walked towards him now, even if he didn’t come up and knock . . .

But I somehow knew, deep down as I still sat there crouched on the floor, that it was all for the best. That the universe was righting itself now after a summer-long foolish mistake involving one forgettable John Watson and a brilliant researcher named Sherlock Holmes. 

It was for the best, with me in my cabin, and his footsteps now walking away outside – walking the other direction. 

It was for the best, because I was a coward, who kept the key in my pocket for weeks instead of giving it to him the day I had it made. And because I was a Ranger, and he belonged in London. Because I now had my memories of the greatest few months of my life, a summer I never deserved, and because Sherlock could be rid of me now, moving on to his real life and his real home, and because he told Nick to take away my job.

Because not even Sherlock Holmes knew my other name, the one my sister had said.

It must be for the best.

I wished I could call my dad to ask him if I was right.

 

\--

 

Lugnut could always tell the last day of the season when I was leaving. 

He knew the moment I crouched down in front of his hut with my hand held out, as if he could smell it on my skin, or read the thoughts on my face. 

He knew, then, as I crouched down and held out my hand for him to sniff, and he hobbled out on shaking legs and collapsed into my open arms, burrowing his nose along my neck and wriggling against my chest. His flapping tail created little dust clouds in the dirt, and I breathed in the scent of him like a balm, like the purest oxygen I had ever breathed, as I whispered his name.

“You know what I’m here to say, old Lug,” I whispered into his fur. He whined under his breath and started to lick along my jaw. I clung to him, and my throat suddenly closed. “I . . . I don’t want to say it, but . . . you know, old man, you know I –”

I swallowed hard and pressed my cheek to the soft spot between his ears. He let me hold him, just like he had a week ago when I’d stumbled into the kennel yard in the middle of the night, still wearing damp clothes, and silently pulled him into my arms. 

I’d sat there in my cabin for another hour after I heard Sherlock walk away, wanting to be absolutely sure he wouldn’t still somehow be standing there when I left.

Wanting to give him the chance to still knock on my front door and call my name.

And after an hour, when no knock came, and I was sure he wouldn’t be hiding somewhere in the trees, I’d run down to the gravel lot and hopped in my truck as fast as I could, then sped through the evening light for hours, barely breathing until I had my face pressed in Lugnut’s warm fur. 

I hadn’t been able to say anything to him, explain anything at all, but he had somehow understood, and curled up for the rest of the night in my arms.

I hadn’t seen Sherlock Holmes for a single second the whole week since. I knew he was still there, technically, since his plane flight with Greg wasn’t for another few days. I came home from a long patrol three days after I left him alone out in the wilderness to find my tent neatly folded on my porch, with my camping stove and a pair of socks I’d left behind stacked next to it. 

I’d wanted to lift the socks to my face and smell them, to see if they somehow smelled of his hands, a hint of cedar. But then I realized that would have been stupid, absolutely idiotic and insane, and so I threw them immediately in the hamper to wash instead and walked away.

I saw Greg a couple times that week, always just from a distance with a pleasant wave. He was finishing up the research, spending time with Molly, packing his bags, doing the long rounds of goodbyes as more and more Rangers left for their winter plans.

You could have offered me a million dollars to guess, a cool million, and I wouldn’t have been able to tell you whether he knew anything strange had happened or not.

Two days after that I stared for a long time at the key, placed back in the drawer and mostly hidden in the shadows. I stared at it until my vision grew blurry, and until Sherlock’s scarf, which I’d been holding in my hands, started to wrinkle from the grip of my fingers. Then I looked away, and quickly threw the scarf up into the top of my closet, telling myself I’d put it on his own porch before I left, even though I knew I sure as hell wasn’t going to touch the damn thing again. 

Then I walked down to the office, picked up the phone, and called up the Canyon offices using the NPS directory taped to the wall, since one of the bus drivers had let slip in the break room that they needed extra winter Enforcement Rangers for patrols.

And now I was crouching there in the dirt holding Lugnut to say goodbye, after what had simultaneously been the quickest and longest season of my entire life. My small bags were packed and waiting behind me along the fence. I’d made a deal with the Park staff to leave my truck with someone in McKinley Park over the winter – as if it was some sort of insurance for them that I would actually come back.

It was the first time in nearly a decade that I wouldn’t end my season by stepping up into my truck after kissing Lugnut goodbye.

“You’d leave without saying goodbye?” I suddenly heard behind me.

Lugnut perked up at the sound of Molly’s voice and squirmed in my arms so she could reach down to rub his belly. I turned to look at her over my shoulder, and the barely concealed hurt on her face made my eyes sting in the corners. I shook my head at myself.

“Course not, kid,” I said, before I rose to my feet and pulled her into my arms. When I went to pull away, she held me closer for another minute. Her hair smelled like fresh oranges, and I knew she must have somehow gotten her hands on some late season fruit on a recent trip to Fairbanks – one she probably took with Greg.

“Some lunatic told me you’re working in the Canyon for the winter?” she finally said, speaking into the fabric of my jacket.

I pulled back and patted the back of her head once before letting my hand fall away. I shoved my hands in my pockets so I wouldn’t play with the buttons on my shirt. “Yeah, well, whatever lunatic told you that is right.”

Her face was unreadable. “Was hoping that was just a stupid rumor, but . . .”

I nodded, and I tried to keep my face from looking as sad as I suddenly felt. I half-smiled. “Not a rumor.”

Lugnut started to cry between us since we were ignoring him. He flopped onto his back with his tongue hanging out, and I crouched down to pet him again. I watched the lines of my fingers slowly stroking through his long fur.

I could tell that Molly wanted to ask me a million more things – questions like why, and what about my cabin, and was I still going to come back, and why I looked like I was on the verge of crying over something as innocent as new winter plans.

We looked at each other for a silent moment, then she took a deep breath and shrugged her shoulders. “Well, that’ll be fun?” she said. “I’ve never seen the Canyon in winter before. Should be beautiful.”

I nodded and looked back down at Lugnut happily groaning as my hands massaged his ears. “Yeah, should be.”

She stood there for another silent minute while I petted Lugnut goodbye, finally holding him close in my arms until I could feel his rapid heartbeat pressed against my own.

“Gonna miss you, old man,” I whispered into his ear. I blinked hard over my wet eyes and let him lick the stray tear that fell down my cheek. “Miss you like hell.” I held his face in my hands, his little twitching black nose, and looked straight into his grey eyes – eyes which always looked the same color as the back of that whale.

“You be good for them, you hear?” I said to him. He yipped and licked my chin. “You’ll be my good boy? My well-behaved old man?”

And suddenly, out of nowhere, I thought of Sherlock lying beside Lugnut that day out in the field – the way his strong hands had gripped his fur and rubbed his legs. The way he’d whispered secrets into Lugnut’s soft, willing ears.

I shut my eyes tight and shook my head against the memory. I couldn’t associate any of that with Lugnut, not with what felt like the only good thing I still had left on the earth. Couldn’t be thinking of the warmth of Sherlock’s hands whenever I pressed my cheek into his soft fur. Couldn’t be remembering his voice, the warmth of his skin . . .

I kissed Lugnut on the snout for a long moment, not caring that Molly could see, and then rose to my feet. Lugnut could tell it was the final goodbye, and he curled up in the dirt and started to cry, like he always did. And like I always did at the end of every season before driving away, I gave him one last long look before rising to my feet, then I walked out of the kennels with his cries echoing in my ears.

Molly was by my side, tugging on the end of her ponytail with her fingers. “You taking the train?” she finally asked after I hefted my bags up onto my shoulders.

“It leaves in fifteen,” I said.

She nodded and didn’t slow down as I started walking down the visitor pathways towards the nearby station. “I’m coming with you,” she announced, taking one of my bags from my shoulders to carry.

I looked down at her, at her beautiful brown hair, and wondered if she would ever understand how grateful that made me feel.

I smiled. “Okay.”

-

By the time we reached the platform, the last few visitors were climbing up the sets of stairs into the train. They would be sitting in the fancy tourist cars with the observation windows for the five-hour ride to Fairbanks, with a fancy cooked dinner and cameras aimed through the windows trying to spot a moose or a bear. 

When the steam blew out from the engine across the now-empty platform, Molly grabbed my arm.

“Tell me you’ll be alright,” she said, sounding desperate. Before I could respond, she continued, “Look, I obviously have no idea what happened, why you look so sad, what the hell is going on, but please, please tell me you’ll be alright. I have to know that before you leave. You have to say.”

Her wide eyes were fixed on my face, and her fingers dug into the muscle of my arm. In that moment, I wanted to throw my bags down onto the ground, and take her by the hand, and sprint as fast as I could away from the waiting train. Run all the way back to Toklat, back to my cabin, with Sherlock’s scarf in the closet. Watch Molly cook us dinner, and fill out reports for Nick, and see Lugnut in the morning. Give myself my shot again in two weeks, alone in my room with the lights off like usual, and then go out for another patrol.

Never see the Grand Canyon with my own two eyes.

The train whistle blew, and one of the workers shouted out for last call.

“John,” Molly said, shaking my arm. “Please, please just tell me you’re alright –”

“I’m alright, kid,” I whispered, reaching out to place my palm on her cheek. “I’m just . . . everything’s alright. It’s all fine. I’ll be alright.”

Her confusion was written all over her face, mixed with something like despair. “Be safe,” she whispered, as the train slowly started to pull away. Her eyes were wet.

“You be safe,” I said back, pressing my palm against her face, and then I was hurling my bags up into the open door to the staff railcar and leaping up onto the moving train before it gathered too much speed. I hung off the side of the train by the handle and turned back to see Molly standing alone on the platform, hugging her arms over her chest with the wind from the train blowing through her hair.

“Have fun in Seattle,” I called back to her. “Say goodbye to Greg for me!”

Her face broke, and I instantly realized my mistake, that I hadn’t told her to say goodbye to Sherlock for me as well. She didn’t answer me, but nodded, and lifted her hand to wave right before she disappeared into a billow of dust in the distance.

I stepped fully inside the train as we pulled around the first major curve leading away from the Park. I was alone in the walkway between the railcars, and the green and grey earth rushed by faster and faster on either side as we gained speed. I could hear the Alaska Railroad workers starting to make their safety announcements in the passenger cars, letting everyone know the menu choices for the evening meal. 

A rush of panic suddenly washed over me, fierce and sharp. I threw myself back against the rattling wall and gripped the steel with my palms, shutting my eyes tightly before I did something insane like leap off the side of the train. 

I needed to go back there, needed to get off, needed to walk on the Denali gravel, needed to hear Lugnut’s bark.

I needed to find Sherlock Holmes, and grip his shoulders with my hands, and tell him that I would gladly be his puzzle, I would be his puzzle forever, if it meant that those desperate, angry minutes out in the tundra didn’t have to mean goodbye.

He had kissed the scars on my chest. He had kissed them, and I'd never really told him how I got them, how much it hurt, about the old nurse and the Greyhound bus. I had never just opened my mouth and said. 

I heard a moan escape my throat, and I sniffed hard so I wouldn’t cry. When I opened my eyes again, the world seemed dimmer, the green of the mountains now muted and grey, and I reached down with my hand to feel between my legs. I adjusted the sock in my boxers, and desperately missed the weight of the cock, the full feel of it in my palm. The cock I’d left behind shoved in my Toklat closet, since wearing it now felt like Sherlock’s own fucking hands touching my bare skin beneath my jeans.

So instead I felt the rolled-up fabric through the denim, and told myself it was warm and real, heavy and _me_. Then I closed my eyes against the rushing Alaskan wilderness, and I thought about how I would be in the Grand Canyon before the sun set the next evening.

Then I whispered, so softly I could barely hear myself over the roaring engine, in a voice that sounded desperate and small and wet.

“Shit.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Does it help at all if I tell you this is the last chapter from 1991? <3
> 
> This fucking chapter was, in all honesty, the hardest thing I've ever written. For weeks (as you all know) I've labored over this, trying to get it out in writing, and get in the right headspace, and write out where it all went wrong. I feel so grateful for all of your patience and continued *incredible* support and encouragement for this fic. As much as I didn't want to write this chapter, and as much as many of you probably didn't want to read it, it's also so important to know where they came from to understand where they finally are now (which is in love, obviously, and so, so relieved to be together).
> 
> That all being said, I would be so grateful to hear from you all on this chapter! I'm SO HAPPY to get it out of my life, and hearing from all of you is one of my greatest joys and sources of inspiration. You're all great.
> 
> Quick note: The Road Lottery is a tradition unique to Denali that started in 1972. That year, the park service decided to close the one Park Road to private vehicles and limit the traffic to *only* park (and lodge tour) busses and government vehicles. Originally, the lottery was meant for Native Alaskans to be able to continue to drive the Park road like they used to enjoy. Eventually, the lottery expanded so anyone can apply, usually in May, and if chosen, you can drive your personal vehicle as far as you want down the Park Road for the day during the 2 weeks of Lottery at the very end of the season. If you ever get the chance to apply and win, DO IT. Driving that one-lane dirt road is unlike anything else. Truly a once in a lifetime experience. You can park, get out of your car, and see absolutely no civilization, nothing but tundra and the Denali range, for as far as your eye can see. I've sat in a vehicle on the road with my Ranger, no one else in sight, and watched the caribou herd roam across the hills like John and Sherlock see earlier in this fic. Truly unforgettable. 
> 
> Just two chapters left! And I promise these next chapters will be hot on the heels of this one :) I can't wait to write them and share the ending of their story with you all!
> 
> Next time: we pick up where we left off, with Sherlock and John heading back to John's cabin after reuniting. I wonder what will happen behind closed doors?!?! (hint: you know exactly what will happen)


	15. August 1992

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bluegrass: Listen to Caitlin Canty sing "Wyoming Wind" [HERE.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqp5yCUSqb0/)
> 
> *I know, I know, my definition of Bluegrass is very loose. But if this song doesn't remind you of an older Ranger John Watson remembering his youth while Sherlock Holmes lies in his arms, I don't know what will. Additionally, I would sell my soul for a good slide guitar.
> 
> Sarah Jarosz: Listen to "Mile on the Moon" [HERE.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SrN58PTvW8/)
> 
>  
> 
> It's here! The second to last chapter! A quick reminder before you dive in that John's sexual experiences and thoughts obviously do not represent those of every trans person. You can have sex any goddamn way you want, and as long as everyone involved is into it and safe, then it is true, full, meaningful sex. No matter how many clothes you're wearing, or who is touching who where. Enjoy, friends. :)

August 1992

 

The second we sat down next to each other in the last row of the old green park bus, I instantly longed for the solitude of the tundra. 

The bus was full, and everyone was talking, and the crackle of the bus driver’s intercom mixed harshly with the sound of the wheels crunching through the harsh dirt. That quiet dream, that little pocket of solace where I had held Sherlock in my arms, close and unafraid – that dream was suddenly gone. Shattered with the clamoring of the real world, rattling the bus windows with noise and heat. 

I felt like I’d been dragged on a stage and paraded before thousands of people, and everyone was studying every inch of my body, taking notes on my clothes and my skin, even though nobody on the bus was even looking our way. I took a long breath through my nose and closed my eyes – picturing the foggy clearing from earlier that day. The silence and the calm. The stillness that had covered me, hovered over us together.

The bus engine roared, and two little kids towards the front of the bus started to scream.

Sherlock was staring out the window at the rolling blue and grey and green. I glanced at him, tracing the achingly familiar line of his jaw, the soft curve of his cheek. It was the profile that had been etched into the down of my pillow over the last year. Lonely nights spent lying awake in my bed, and I could perfectly picture the way his bones would press themselves into the mattress. A year spent sleeping with ghosts, dreaming of cedar-scented sheets. 

Everything was painfully, chaotically loud, threatening to drown me in the crowds and noise.

And then, without looking away from the window, Sherlock quietly reached over to take my hand.

I stared down at our fingers wrapped around each other, hidden between our thighs in the crowded bus. He gripped me, hard. There were freckles from the sun blooming across the back of his hand, and there was mud still smudged across his skin from our fall down the slope back out in the rain. He had held the back of my head with those very same fingers. He had caressed the side of my neck. 

The simple warmth of his hand engulfed my palm.

And I realized, as we sat there together swaying with the bumpy turns of the bus, that nobody else on that bus even knew that I was a Ranger. I didn’t have my uniform on, no hat, no badge, no gun. I wasn’t filling out reports, or giving out orders, or on my way to conduct another safety patrol. They didn’t know that I was on my way back to my cabin in the middle of the Park, or that I had official backcountry reports to finish writing in my pack, or that I had a grueling thirteen-hour Road Lottery shift that started the next morning at six.

No, sitting there on the hot leather seat, with the hum of chatting visitors and the clicks of flashing cameras surrounding me, with the Denali landscape rushing by outside the dusty bus windows, I realized that I was just a man. 

I was a man riding the late afternoon Kantishna bus through Denali National Park, holding the hand of the one person I wanted to be with more than anyone else on the earth. Watching him stare out the window at the most devastatingly beautiful place I’d ever known.

And he was holding my hand.

Thick emotion suddenly overwhelmed me in a wave – everything that I had kept held in on our hike back out to the Road earlier that afternoon, when we’d laughed together, and quietly reminisced, and enjoyed our feet walking in perfect sync. 

We were riding through the park together, and I could still taste the wetness from his mouth on my lips, and we were both still damp from mud and rain, and it was more awe-inspiring, more overwhelming than that first drive I took in my truck through the Denali entrance, just four days after leaving Seattle, when I’d filled my lungs with the scent of the quaking aspens for the very first time.

And I had never, in my entire life, felt more like a Ranger than I did in that moment.

Just when I was going to turn to him and somehow put it all into words, the bus slowed to a halt, and a hum of excited whispering filled the hot air. Cameras clicked and flashed. The bus driver murmured into his intercom that there was a lone male wolf coming up around the next curve of the Road, and for everyone to be silent and keep their arms and legs inside the bus.

Everything went absolutely still.

We were the only two people who hadn’t leapt to our feet and crowded the windows on the opposite side of the bus. Visitors were plastered to the dusty windows, everyone holding their breath, and I heard the collective gasp and clicks of cameras as the wolf must have come into view, slowly ambling along the edge of the Road towards us.

I smiled quietly, remembering the first time I’d seen a wolf in the park. It had taken me almost three months back in my first season to spot one – back then, before the major wolf territory conservation projects had kicked in, and seeing an actual wolf in the park by chance was far more of a badge of honor than spotting a grizzly. 

I’d been riding in the passenger seat of one of the Park vans, being driven out to a crack-of-dawn shift at Eielson by Steven, one of the oldest Park Rangers at the time who called anyone under the age of fifty-five “junior” instead of their name. There’d been constant bear sightings down near the Alpine Walk trail, and they were keeping extra Enforcement staff on hand in case any visitors got too close. I was sitting there in the seat, just enjoying the grey dawn light as it spilled over the park, chasing away the thick layer of fog that had settled around Stoney Point and revealing the outlines of moose antlers far off in the distance, when suddenly, startling me, Steven had slammed on the brakes at the top of a hill.

“Everything ok --?” I started to ask, but Steven just held up his hand and quietly said, “Look.”

And just before us, appearing out of the mist like a mirage, with streaks of golden sun illuminating its steaming fur, a wolf had appeared, raising its head to scan across the valley.

We watched it in complete silence. I could have heard someone whispering from clear across the other side of the park. My heart raced in my chest, pushing out against my uniform, and I gripped my thighs with my hands so my fingers wouldn’t shake. Dust that had kicked up from the tires gradually settled from floating up into the air, blowing away with the mist and fog, and it felt like the three of us were the only beings alive.

The wolf stood there for what felt like hours, looking out at the distant peaks. I watched its muscles quiver, and its chest rose and fell with quick puffs of breath. Then finally, it bent its head to sniff at the ground, then kept its nose to the moss as it slowly turned down the peak and trotted away.

Just when the last bit of its tail disappeared around a mass of boulders, Steven whistled through his teeth, and I jumped, forgetting I hadn’t been alone. 

“Never gets old, Junior,” he whispered as he turned the truck’s engine back on. He shook his head and grinned as we kicked up another cloud of dust and started to drive. “Never gets old,” he said again. 

And I’d looked down at his weathered hands gripping the gear shift of the truck, thought of all the beautiful things they’d seen, the powerful things they’d touched, and I’d known, right then, that one day my own wrinkled hands would be pointing out a wolf to a new Denali Ranger, too.

I blinked and looked over at Sherlock, expecting him to be craning his neck to see the wolf walking by our bus, either that or muttering under his breath that all the visitors flashing their cameras were idiots, but instead he was just looking out the window, the opposite direction of everyone else. My chest panged when I saw him reach up his other hand to cover his eyes. 

I heard a hitch in his breath. My whole body froze at the sound.

“Sherlock?” I whispered. I couldn’t keep the fear out of my voice – that I had gotten him back for just a few hours, but now he was already slipping away, slipping right through my fingers, just out of reach of my touch –

But he squeezed my hand harder, kept hidden between the warmth of our thighs. He sniffed hard and wiped again at his eyes. I saw his lips shake.

And then, with a power that knocked the breath from my lungs, he took his hand away from his face, drew in a long, shaky breath, and he met my gaze in the reflection of the window. His eyes were wet, and rimmed with red, and the tops of his cheeks shone from wiped away tears. We looked at each other, and he tried to smile before his lips twisted again, unable to hold anything back, and it was in that moment that I understood.

He wasn’t upset about anything at all. He wasn’t slipping away through my fingers.

He was still holding my hand.

Something in me released, something that had still been held tightly in my chest, even after we’d kissed, even after he’d laughed with me on the long hike back.

I let out a breath and held his hand in both of mine. I kneaded my thumbs into the soft skin of his palm. My head relaxed against the seat behind me, and I felt every bit of tension leave my body in a rush. 

“I know,” I whispered, so softly that even he could barely hear it. He read my lips in the window reflection, and his mouth broke again into a wet smile. He wiped his arm across his eyes and laughed under his breath at himself.

“Sorry,” he finally said in a rough voice. The other people in the bus were starting to re-take their seats, a mass of whispering and movement now that the wolf had disappeared behind us. The bus engine roared to life.

He wove his fingers through mine. He still looked at my face through the window.

“It’s just . . .” he said, and when he shook his head, when he couldn’t finish, I felt my own eyes grow wet.

“I know.”

He looked at me for another moment, reading the lines of my face, and I knew, deep down, that he was somehow seeing a memory I’d never even told him – not yet. 

He was seeing the whale, or the gun in my father’s hands, or the day I finally graduated from our rundown high school, even after missing more than half the days of school, and I walked out of the stuffy gym with my hat sitting sideways on my head, and the rolled up piece of white paper in my hands, and I’d realized, looking out at the sea of families hugging in the dead-grass yard, that nobody I knew had come. Not even my sister. Not even my dad. 

And so I’d walked the three miles back home through the fields, with my graduation gown and dress stuffed back in a trash bin by the school, and I’d come home to the weedy front yard of our house swarming with police – something about my mom having gotten her hands on a knife. Something about my sister and her kids crying at the next-door neighbor’s house. Something about scotch spilled on the hardwood floor.

And my dad had looked up and seen me there, standing in the middle of the chaos in my gym uniform I’d changed into before leaving the school, with the rolled-up paper of my diploma still clutched in my hand, and his mouth had twisted the same way Sherlock’s just had, and he’d thumped me on the back and said, “ _You know I wished I coulda been there, Ranger. You know I woulda come._ ”

And I realized that Sherlock was somehow seeing, looking at my face in the reflection of the Denali bus window, that I had been glad, been _relieved_ , standing there in the yard after a graduation ceremony I’d walked away from alone. Because if nobody I really knew had been there to hear them call out my name, and see me hide my flinch at the sound, and seen the hints of the dress my mom had sewn for my sister peeking out through the gap in the graduation gown, then maybe I could pretend that none of it had ever even happened. Maybe I could make myself believe it had all been a horrible dream.

And I knew Sherlock could see, too, even though I hadn’t yet gotten the chance to say the words, that the shotgun had happened just nine days after that, the morning that I came down to the kitchen with a freshly buzzed head, and a pair of my dad’s old jeans thrown on over my thin legs, and absolutely no fucks left to give.

“Looks like the two of you got yourselves caught out in that storm earlier today,” I suddenly heard. I jumped, and then looked up to see a woman around Sherlock’s age peering over the back of the seat in front of us. For some reason, my eyes focused immediately on the bright pink nail polish on her hands.

Then I remembered my own hands, still holding Sherlock’s between my own.

“Got more mud on you than there is outside,” the woman was still saying. My heart raced. I went to move my hands away from Sherlock’s, when I felt his fingers tighten around my own, not letting me pull away.

“We did. What a stunningly brilliant observation,” I heard Sherlock say beside me. I couldn’t even look over to tell him to knock it off. All I could feel was his hand in mine. All I could focus on was the neon pink of her nails. The fact she might see . . .

To my surprise, the woman threw back her head and laughed. It caused some of her long braids to fall over the back of the seat, nearly brushing my knees. 

“Alright there, sassy,” she said, still smiling. “Point taken.” I waited for her to turn back around, or to mention the fact that the two men were holding hands in the seat behind her, but instead she just rested her chin on her hands and looked out the window at the park passing us by. 

“Bet you were glad when those skies finally cleared up,” she went on. “I know I was – came all this fucking way from New York just to celebrate my grandparents’ anniversary and all we saw all morning was a giant grey cloud.”

Sherlock hummed beside me. “Yes, this place will do that to you,” he said.

She frowned. “Don’t tell me you were fine with all the rain – sounds like you came clear across an ocean just to be here.”

He smiled, and I felt his fingers tighten around my own. “Indeed, I did.”

Warmth flooded my chest, and for the first time in the conversation, I spoke. “We were glad for the clear skies,” I said. “Definitely glad.”

I felt Sherlock’s gaze flicker to the side of my face. I knew that he understood I was talking about far more than the weather.

The woman looked over her shoulder at a group of people sitting a few rows up – family, from the way they smiled back at her – then she turned back to us and leaned farther over the seat.

“Look, since you’re not being antisocial retirees like half the other old people on this bus,” the woman said in a fake whisper, and as I laughed, she went on, “Either of you know enough yet to be able to tell me what the hell is the difference between a caribou and a reindeer? My son’s asked me two hundred times on this trip, and trying to pin down a Ranger to talk to him for more than ten seconds is like trying to speak with the President, you know? I’m running out of ways to distract him playing ‘I spy’ - Everything out here is just brown and green . . .”

I tensed again, waiting for Sherlock to rip her a new one, but instead, I felt his body relax into the seat, and he gestured towards me with his head. “Actually, John here is a Ranger,” he said. “He can tell you far more than just that, if you like.”

“You’re a Ranger?!” she said, amazed. Her hand clutched the seat harder with excitement. Her eyes traveled over my face and clothes. “But you’re not wearing –” her voice trailed off, and I realized with a sickening lurch that she had finally noticed our joined hands.

That split-second lasted for an eternity in my mind. She saw our hands, and she looked back up at my face, at my plain clothes covered in mud and drying rain. She glanced over at Sherlock who was steadily holding her gaze.

Sherlock’s thumb stroked my skin.

She licked her lips and looked back at my flannel shirt. “Well, unless ‘mud’ is the new uniform color, you’re not wearing any Ranger uniform I can see,” she finally said, as if that pause hadn’t even happened.

The air in the bus seemed to melt. The ice in my spine was gone.

I gulped down a lungful of air and cleared my throat so I could speak, hoping my voice wouldn’t shake. “I’m off duty today,” I said. “But yeah, I work here.”

Her face brightened, and she gave me a small smile I couldn’t fully read. The bus went over a particularly large bump, and she gripped the seat to keep turned around while the visitors in the rest of the bus cried out in surprise. 

“So, what’s your story, then?” she asked. When I frowned, she added, “Well, you know kids. My son’s been asking every person out here in a uniform why they wanted to be a Ranger. Can’t get enough of it - thinks you’re all superheroes.”

I laughed. “God, I hope not –”

“Well, my son’s rubbed off on me, so I’m gonna ask you. What’s your story?”

It was a question I had been asked hundreds of times before. In Canyonlands, in Death Valley, in the Grand Canyon, in Denali. I’d been asked it by little kids holding grizzly bear stuffed animals, and grandparents holding hands on their 50th Anniversary vacations, and teenagers who dreamed of adventure in the outdoors. By teenagers who looked bored to tears being dragged along on the family trip.

And every time, my answer was the same: I grew up near a National Park, I went out on that first hike my first week at Canyonlands, someone got me a connection with the job, etc.

And every time, the person who asked always looked amazed. How could I possibly choose this, and how difficult it must be, and how lucky I am. How my life must be so different from everyone else’s, living in a place like this. Where the hell do I go to buy food.

As she waited for my answer, I suddenly remembered walking down the street in New York City towards the clinic, directions someone had written down for me back in South Dakota clutched in my hand, and my backpack wrapped up against my chest in my arms. I’d been walking, frantically looking at the street signs, dodging taxis, and trying not to get lost, with my hat pulled down and a too-tight-to-breathe strip of cotton around my chest.

And I’d turned a corner, looked up, and seen a couple holding hands. A young man and a woman, casually holding hands and walking down the street towards the park, and the man had leaned over and kissed the side of the woman’s head, whispering something into her ear, before they both laughed and glanced into each other’s eyes.

Nobody else had paid them any attention at all.

I’d stopped in my tracks, staring, and in that moment, I doubted every single thing in my life. I doubted my short hair, and the name John, and the money bundled up in the backpack in my hands. I doubted the clinic, the scars I knew I was about to have etched into my chest, and the last words I ever yelled back at my parents. I doubted not turning around in the driveway when my sister had whispered my name.

I’d wanted to turn back. 

Screw the clinic, grow back out my hair, untie my chest, change my shirt. Anything to be able to have what those two strangers just shared in the middle of the New York sidewalk. Anything not to be walking through the crowded streets all alone, to look over and have someone at my side, to have someone holding my hand for everyone to see.

I’d stood there for a long time, so long that I knew I was going to be late.

Then I took one step backwards, away from the clinic, just one step. I turned my head to start walking the other way, walk back to the airport, back on a plane. And as I turned, I’d caught a glimpse of myself in the reflection of the Macy’s window to my left.

I’d seen myself, _myself_ , the way I always wished I could see me in the dingy bathroom mirror back at our old house.

I’d seen John Watson, walking through New York City, with an old Minnesota Twins baseball cap on his head.

“ _Sir,_ ” I heard behind me. The person was irritated. “ _Sir!_ ”

I turned, and I saw that there was a woman behind me trying to push a stroller down the sidewalk. I saw I was blocking her path. She had been talking to _me_.

I muttered, “ _Sorry_ ,” in my deepest voice, and quickly stepped out of the way. And once she had passed, after rolling her eyes, I looked down at the folded paper in my hands to check the directions. Then I’d marched to the clinic, head held high, without once turning back.

The woman on the bus was still waiting for my answer.

Sherlock Holmes was holding my hand. And she had seen. And she had still asked.

“Not a very exciting story,” I finally said, squeezing Sherlock’s fingers in mine. “Just . . . it’s always been me. The only thing I did that ever felt right, I guess. Working out here in the parks.”

I expected her to look disappointed in my vague answer, but instead she only nodded and held my gaze. “You been doing it a long time?” she asked.

I raised my eyebrows, suddenly shocked at my own answer. “Twenty years.”

“Well, shit, if you haven’t been eaten by any wild animals by now, I’d say you’re pretty good at what you do.”

Before I could respond, Sherlock sat forward next to me in the seat. “John is excellent at what he does,” he said, so solemn and serious it was like he was pronouncing someone’s fate. “He is by far the most competent Ranger in this entire park.”

The woman raised her eyebrows. “That’s quite the pronouncement.” 

I laughed. “He’s exaggerating –“ I started to say, but then she gave me a small wink. “I wouldn’t argue with the likes of him,” she said. Then she gestured over her shoulder, and her face looked a bit guilty. “Look, I know you’re not working, but my son would be over the moon if he could meet you for a minute. Most of the other Rangers we’ve seen haven’t really had time. . . He really loves the outdoors whenever he gets to go. . .”

My original intention for that bus ride had been to take a nap next to Sherlock’s body, feel the warmth of his skin through his shirt, breathe in the same air as his lungs, remember the press of his lips.

Sherlock’s thigh pressed into mine. I smiled at her. “I’d love to meet him,” I said. 

Her face washed over with relief. “Right, I’ll call him over. You’re a real saint. He’s gonna pee his pants.”

I was still laughing when she leaned over her shoulder and called out, “Alexander!” to the group of people sitting a few rows up. A little boy popped up from his seat, about nine or ten, and he stumbled down the bumpy bus, clutching the backs of the seats, after the woman waved him over.

“Got someone for you to meet,” she said, holding his shoulders so he could sit down next to her on the seat. They both leaned over the back. 

“This here’s John. . .” She paused, and she looked at me to help her out. 

“Watson,” I said.

“This here’s John Watson. He’s a Ranger here in the park. Wants to meet you.”

I expected the boy to smile, or look excited, but instead he only gave me a hard look and frowned. “He’s not wearing a uniform, or wearing a badge,” he said. He turned to his mom. “This man’s lying to you!”

And just when the woman blushed and opened her mouth to correct him, Sherlock laughed loudly beside me and leaned forward in the seat. He pulled his hand from mine, gently, then extended it towards the kid.

“You make an extremely valid point,” he said. “It’s always good to be fully aware of the facts before trusting anything you’re told. I can, in fact, confirm that this man beside me is a Ranger. He is a GS-9 level Enforcement Ranger, although he could easily be a GS-11 if he chose, and is tasked with keeping the park and its visitors safe. He is not wearing his uniform because I requested he accompany me on a casual backpacking trip the last three days. Now, what is your name?”

The kid looked at Sherlock with wide eyes, mouth hanging half-open. He extended his hand slowly, reverently, and Sherlock took it in a firm grip. They did a business-like handshake.

“Alexander Brooks,” the boy said, with a firm nod.

Sherlock bowed his head. “Mr. Brooks, Sherlock Holmes.” He turned to me. “This here is Ranger John Watson.”

Alexander turned to me and very seriously took my hand. “Ranger Watson,” he said, mimicking Sherlock’s deep voice.

I hid my grin. “Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Brooks. Your mother tells me you might have some questions about the park?”

He nodded and reached down into his pocket to bring out a small spiral notebook, covered in lopsided writing. He flipped through a few pages, nearly falling over with the turns of the bus. “I do,” he said, and I could practically feel the power of Sherlock’s grin beside me.

“Shoot,” I said.

Alexander cleared his throat. “What, exactly, is the difference between a caribou and a reindeer?” he asked.

His mother gave me a knowing glance, then rolled her eyes. I had a feeling she had heard him ask that question a hundred times before.

I leaned forward. “A lot of people have that question,” I said. “It’s a good one to ask. You see, most people think that they’re two different types of animals, and I could see why you would, I mean, they have two totally different names, but actually –”

“Oh, come on, just answer him, will you?” Sherlock cut in. He leaned forward and held Alexander’s gaze over the seat. “Reindeer are domesticated caribou,” he said quickly. “It means caribou that were taken out of the wild, or born in captivity, and raised by humans. Next question.”

The boy’s eyes widened, and I tensely waited for him to cry or turn to his mom to complain, then a brightness washed over his face, and he flipped through his notebook again, looking only at Sherlock. The rest of us didn’t exist.

“What is the most effective way to survive a brown bear attack versus a black bear attack?”

His mom huffed. “Alexander . . .”

“Mom!”

Sherlock grinned. “It’s quite simple. I assume you know the fastest and most effective way to distinguish a brown bear from a black bear?”

“The shape of its head and snout. Obviously.”

“Obviously. Now, if you see that the bear is guarding its cubs or food, regardless of whether it’s black or brown, then you’ll want to lie down and play dead, the easiest way to do this being ---”

I gradually tuned out the specifics of Sherlock’s answer, watching his eyes light up as he answered question after question. His thigh pressed into mine. The two of them talked, answering more than ten of Alexander’s questions, until the bus finally pulled into the gravel lot by the visitor tent at Toklat. The woman flashed me a grateful smile as the bus driver made the announcement that they’d take a thirty-minute break for people to use the bathrooms and talk to Rangers in the tent.

“Thank you,” she mouthed as everyone started to gather up their stuff. 

I glanced at Sherlock and Alexander, still deep in a conversation about types of moss. “Trust me, he loved that,” I said. “There’s only so much that I’ll put up with his ramblings on things. Having such a willing audience was probably like Christmas.”

“So, he works here too, then?”

I nodded. “Tracks and researches the wolves.”

She gave me an odd look before asking, in a quiet voice. “Is that how you met?”

I suddenly remembered Molly’s timid voice at her kitchen table from a few months ago. “ _So. . . does that mean . . .are you – out?_ ”

I looked back at this woman, this woman whose first name I didn’t even know, and I nodded, forcing myself to keep my head high. “Last season,” I said, realizing I was grinning as I said it.

She smiled back as she hefted a backpack onto her shoulders, then guided Alexander out of the bench with a hand on the back of his neck. “Come on now,” she was saying, “Let the poor man get his stuff.”

Sherlock looked at me as if he’d forgotten I was even there. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to –”

“That kid loved that,” I said, handing him his pack. “And so did you.”

He looked quickly out the window, but I caught the corner of his grin.

Alexander and his mom were waiting for us outside the bus at the bottom of the stairs. I breathed in a lungful of the familiar Toklat air – the fresh breeze off the river rock and the cool, green wind blowing down from the nearby slopes.

Sherlock held out a hand for Alexander to shake. “You’ve got the mind of a scientist, Mr. Brooks,” he said. “If you ever find yourself in London and need a lab to work in, I can put in a good word for you in a number of places.”

His mother laughed and put her arm around Alexander’s shoulders. “Let’s hope that’s not for another decade, at least, right?”

The kid rolled his eyes and huffed. “Mom!”

Sherlock was letting Alexander ask him another question about types of birds, and I caught the woman’s gaze. “I never got your name. . .” I said.

She held out her hand. “Sorry, Natasha.”

When I went to pull away from our handshake, she kept my hand in hers. “Thank you,” she said softly. “He’s been . . . having a rough time. At school. Having two Rangers give him the time of day for so long, it means a lot. Haven’t heard him talk this much in months.”

I swallowed over my tight throat and shook her hand again. “Thank you, too,” I said, unable to say anything else but hoping she understood what I meant.

She nodded back, seriously, then glanced quickly at Sherlock. She understood.

“We’d best be going now, Mr. Brooks,” I heard Sherlock say next to me. The kid frowned. “Aren’t you getting back on the bus with us to Wonder Lake?”

“We live here, actually,” I said, looking farther down the side road towards the hidden cabins in the distant trees. “This is our stop.”

Alexander’s eyebrows rose up his forehead. “You live here?! You both _live_ here all the time in the park?!”

Before I could open my mouth to correct him, to tell him that only I really lived here, and not all the time, Sherlock answered, “We do get to live here all the time,” he said, nodding. “It’s a special place to us both.”

I wiped a hand over my mouth so I wouldn’t reach out to kiss him instead.

Natasha gathered Alexander back to her side. “You both have a free dinner in New York City if you ever stop by, okay? You ever been?”

Sherlock shook his head. “Only layovers at the airport.” He flashed me a quick glance, unsure as to what I would say.

I held her gaze, and I remembered the way the sunlight had reflected off the top of the Empire State Building as I’d waited for my Greyhound Bus bound for Utah, that nurse’s crisp fifty-dollar bill folded deep in my pocket.

“I have,” I said. “I want to take him back there with me some day.”

She winked and handed over a business card for a salon. “This here’s my place,” she said. “Call us up when you’re in town.” She looked over at Sherlock and waved her hand towards his head. “And we’ll deal with . . . fixing whatever hairstyle you claim to have going on up there.”

Sherlock scoffed as I barked out a laugh. “Well it’s hardly fair to judge me if I’ve just been caught in a storm, as you so ingeniously pointed out.”

“We can take you to the Natural History Museum!” Alexander cried out.

Sherlock gave Natasha another fake-harsh look before he bowed seriously and bent to look Alexander in the eye. “It would be a pleasure.”

I suddenly remembered something, something I always had on me, and I patted my pockets before I remembered I wasn’t wearing my uniform shirt. “Hold on, before you go,” I said, then bent to dig in the smaller pockets of my bag. I smiled when my fingers clasped around the little wooden badge I was hoping would be in there. I knelt on one knee and held it out to Alexander in my palm.

I cleared my throat. “Mr. Brooks, I hereby pronounce you a Junior Ranger of Denali National Park,” I said, in my official voice. When Alexander didn’t immediately take it from my hand, I leaned forward to pin the little carved wooden badge to his shirt.

But he leaned back, and he looked me right in the eye with a frown. “Hold up, isn’t that for babies?”

I held in a shocked laugh as his mom put her hands on her hips. “Alexander Devon Brooks, you will apologize to Ranger Watson, and thank him for his –”

“It’s fine, really,” I said up to her, taking the badge back in my hand.

“While your reasoning that these pins are mostly created for ‘babies’ – as you say – is sound, I must inform you that you are, in fact, making a grave error,” I heard Sherlock say above me. He knelt down beside me on one knee and looked Alexander seriously in the eye. “A badge from Ranger Watson is not simply ‘any’ Junior Ranger badge. It is an honor of the highest rarity. I have never before, with my own two eyes, seen him bestow it on another human being. It is reserved for the brightest and best. The most promising in the Natural Resources Field. Are you sure you really want to reject it now, Mr. Brooks?”

I stopped my mouth from hanging open at Sherlock’s words, for what felt like the hundredth time in the last two hours, then turned back to the kid, looking at me now with a guilty face. “I’m sorry Ranger Watson,” he said, looking at his toes. 

I grinned, then leaned forward to pin the badge again to his checkered shirt. “Nothing to apologize for,” I said. “This is an honor I’m proud to give.”

His chest puffed up when I finished pinning the small badge. I looked up just in time to see Natasha quickly blinking her eyes.

“Natasha! Come on, we wanna take a group photo with these antlers they got over here!”

An older woman was waving over Natasha towards the telescopes, standing with their large group by the antlers the Rangers set out for photo props.

“We’re being summoned,” Natasha said with a sigh, as Sherlock and I got to our feet. “Thank you both, again.”

I reached up to tip my uniform hat, then realized halfway to my head that I wasn’t wearing it. I heard Sherlock chuckle beside me. “Enjoy the rest of your trip,” I said, and we both waved as they turned away.

We stood there, shoulder to shoulder, as the crowds in the gravel continued to shift and move around us. Alexander looked behind him and waved one last time to Sherlock, and Sherlock raised his own hand and nodded in goodbye. We watched him show off his pin to the whole family when he reached them by the antlers.

I gently bumped Sherlock’s side. “Did I just meet the equivalent of Sherlock Holmes as a nine-year-old?”

Sherlock grinned, but I looked over just in time to catch a flash of sadness on his face. “I believe you did,” he said, then, in a whisper, “but I also hope not.”

Just then, someone spotted a moose out on the riverbed, and a massive crowd of visitors swarmed past us to get a better view. I waited to speak until we were alone in the gravel back by the bus, watching the backs of children jumping to try and get a better view over the adults.

“There was a kid visited Death Valley my second season there,” I said in a low voice. “I met the family waiting for the dad to bring the car around from the parking lot. The mom was asking me where they should go for an easy hike.”

I closed my eyes for a moment, and I could see it all like a film preserved right in front of my eyes. The way the girl, the kid, had been hunching her spine back in her shirt, standing away from everyone else. The way she’d been staring at the ground. There was something about her hair, the look on her face. . . And I didn’t know for sure, of course I didn’t know, there was no way I could ever even have the right to know, and yet, watching her stand there, it was like watching a twin of my twelve-year-old self – like seeing a ghost.

I opened my eyes again, and I blinked in the harsh sun glare illuminating the metal busses and the rock river bed. “I don’t know,” I finally said with a shrug. “I don’t . . . I don’t know why. How I even thought this, but, I think . . .” I looked over at Sherlock, hoping he would understand. “I just knew. Looking at h--, looking at that kid standing there sweating in the parking lot, I just knew.”

Sherlock’s eyes were soft. “I don’t think you need to have a reason for how you knew.”

I shrugged my shoulders again and crossed my arms over my chest. “I didn’t talk to the kid, or anything, once I was done talking to the mom. I think I was late for a shift, if I remember right.” I shook my head. “God, I regret, so much, that I didn’t walk over there. That I didn’t . . . that I didn’t just say –”

“What would you have said?” Sherlock asked, gently.

I laughed at myself. “Hell if I know.”

And I wanted to tell him, I wanted to explain to him how I still searched for that kid in the crowds. How I looked at every face. . .

I turned to him. “You know, even all this time later, every late-twenty-something guy that I see here in the park, who looks even a little bit like that kid . . . I look at them, at their face, and I hope it’s them. Guys here with their own families, with their own children, with their friends, I hope to God every time that it’s that same kid. That they . . . that they made it, you know?”

Sherlock looked into my eyes. “Like you,” he whispered.

I shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

Sherlock looked at me for a long moment before gesturing back to the cabins. “Let’s go home,” he whispered.

An unexpected relief flooded through my bones. I nodded.

We were silent as we walked up the road towards the cabins, ambling slowly with sore muscles after so many days of hiking and the long ride in the cramped bus. Just before we were fully out of sight from the parking lot at our backs, filled with four separate visitor busses, Sherlock rubbed his palm all the way down my arm. He lightly gripped my wrist with his fingers, and my entire body shivered at the warmth.

He took a deep breath, and I waited for him to say something important – something about New York, or what happened out on the tundra, or the fact that I just let another human being see us holding hands.

Instead, he said, “You know, nothing could have killed my sexual desire more than watching you pick up a woman’s phone number over the course of an hour on a filthy bus.”

I threw back my head and laughed, and it echoed through the warm valley. 

“You know she only gave me that so you can field questions from her son again for hours. I noticed you barely even touched on the topic of wolves with him.”

Sherlock huffed. “That doesn’t mean you had to be so . . . _charming_ about it all.”

And as I laughed again, he met my gaze, and his fingers tightened around my wrist. And I suddenly remembered, suddenly realized, how big that moment had been for him, too. 

“ _Nobody’s ever known_ ,” he had said to me, more than a year ago in the front seat of my truck. We were both remembering it now.

“I’ll be more of an antisocial dick next time,” I said, smiling at his warm gaze. “Take a page from your book.”

His eyes grew warm, and the wind blew a curl across his forehead. “Excellent,” he whispered, and he ran his thumb along the vein in my wrist before letting my hand fall away, right as we came into view of the sea of cabins.

-

“I’m not doing anything else before a shower,” I said as we reached my porch steps.

He opened his mouth to argue, but I put my hand on his chest. “Seriously, we’re both covered in mud. I won’t have . . .” I swallowed and lowered my voice. “I won’t be with you again when I’m all filthy and wet,” I said.

A saw a shiver run up the skin of his neck. He smirked. “What if I told you I wanted it filthy and wet?” he asked. 

I stared at him, and the sudden warmth I felt for him, overwhelming every inch of my body, was so intense that I almost stepped forward and pulled him into my arms.

I traced the lines of his mouth with my eyes.

“I’m taking a shower,” I said, for some reason whispering, and I knew I wasn’t hiding my grin.

A breeze blew through the trees surrounding my cabin, brushing the branches against the rough wood and blowing the curls back from his face. I watched his eyelashes tangle together as he blinked once, twice.

“I’ll meet you back here,” he said, and we shared a mutual breath, before he turned to walk back to his cabin to get his things.

When he had taken four steps away, I heard myself calling his name.

“Sherlock!”

He looked back over his shoulder, and the sunlight illuminated a stripe of warmth across his cheek. I stood there, not even knowing what to say, unsure of how to tell him that I’d sat slumped against the very same wooden door behind me a year ago, listening to his voice out in the gravel, thinking I’d never hear it ever again.

“John,” he said back, and I realized then that he was thinking the same thing.

“Right. See you back here, then,” I said, lamely. He grinned, and I thought I caught the hint of a wink before he turned and practically floated across the ground back to his cabin through the trees.

I watched him disappear into the shade completely before I opened the door to my cabin and closed it behind me. I dropped my pack to the floor.

My cabin was utterly silent.

And yet, I could hear the sound of my own breathing. I could still feel the warm imprint of his fingers around my wrist. I could smell a hint of his scent buried in the collar of my shirt from where his hands had gripped me as we kissed. 

I knew, within a few hours, that one of his curled hairs would be lying on my hardwood floor. 

I expected myself to be in a rush, desperate to speed up time, trying to jump ahead, and yet my body took its time, gathering up my shower supplies, digging through my drawers to find sweats and a tee to wear. The shower house was empty when I entered it, and I kept the light off out of habit, then sighed as a blast of warm water hit my skin. It was the same wave of relief I’d felt countless times before – that first rush of warm, clean water across my body after days out camping in the wilderness. I could feel it blasting the dried dirt and mud from my skin, caressing the tired muscles in my shoulders and legs, and I softly moaned under my breath.

I heard the shower house door open, and feet padded across the tile to enter the stall right next to mine. The lights were still off. Without even having to think, I knew it was him.

I heard him setting out his shampoo and conditioner on the shelf, then his own blast of water filled the bathroom, and the steam from our stalls started to turn to thick fog in the air.

I heard him moan, too.

Suddenly, my mind was filled images of his bare skin dripping with water. Droplets running over the rises of his chest, pooling in the dips of his collarbones, clinging to the bones of his hips. In my mind, I saw his curls plastered down his neck, the way water would cling to the tips of his eyelashes and cover his full lips. The way it would soak through the hair above his cock, and caress the skin of his thighs –

I slammed off my shower and sucked in a breath. A deep warmth was starting to thrum low in my gut, in a way I hadn’t fully felt for nearly a year. And though I desperately wanted to reach down and feel myself, to imagine Sherlock moaning, dripping with water, bare and hot in my own wet arms, rubbing up slick against me in the place where I was growing hard, I also somehow knew that it was imperative that I wait for him. That I waited to see him in my cabin, real and whole, flesh and bone, and not just my imagination.

I took a deep breath, shook my shoulders, then stepped out into the cool air to grab my towel.

He was still showering as I made my way towards the door, dressed in old sweatpants and a t-shirt I had picked up from the Death Valley gift shop my last day on shift. I heard the water splash off his skin, and his breath mixed with the sound of the spray in the air. The scent of his shampoo filled my nose, and I breathed it in, marveling in the fact that he probably knew I was hesitating by the door to do just that. That I was allowed to be there, knowing he was naked on the other side of a thin door.

The air back in my cabin felt electric against my skin. I stood at the kitchen counter looking out the window for about ten seconds before I gave up and started moving around, putting away our backpacking supplies and hanging up the fly of my tent to air it out. I lost myself in the simple routine of it all, putting back everything exactly where it went, cleaning off all the gear, re-rolling our sleeping bags and pads. I was so lost in the movements that it startled me to hear my cabin door opening.

I leapt to my feet from where I’d been crouching in the kitchen putting my camping stove away, and a sudden relief filled me, so sharply it brought water to my eyes, that Sherlock had simply entered my cabin without even knocking.

I stood there, in my simple clothes, with my still damp hair, and my bare feet, and he looked back at me like I was the sun in the middle of the hardwood floor. He was wearing an old Henley I’d seen last season and the flannel pajama bottoms I knew he loved. I could smell his soap on his skin, see a little drop of water fall from the tip of his curls.

We stared at each other, neither of us wanting to break the spell and move. I remembered that morning what felt like decades ago, when he stood in almost the exact same spot after breaking into my room, and looked at me in the same frozen way, that morning I’d walked out in my underwear to make us coffee without even realizing I didn’t have my sock rolled up in my boxers.

And he was more beautiful, more unbelievable, standing there in the dim light of my kitchen, with his drying curls frizzing about his head and a sunburn tinging his cheeks, than he had been that very first day back East in the parking lot in a perfectly tailored suit.

I breathed out through my nose, and my breath shook. He was standing there, in my cabin. 

He was standing there, and he wasn’t going to turn and walk away. 

Suddenly he was rushing towards me, arms outstretched, and I was pulling him against my body, straight into my chest, and gripping his back. I held him, and he held me.

“John,” he whispered in a tight voice. I sighed again. I couldn’t say anything back. I clutched him to me as he pressed his cheek into my neck. I could feel the warmth of his skin from the shower through his shirt, still a bit damp beneath the cotton, and his spine pressed back against my hands as he took deep breaths. 

We had never hugged like that before. Not ever.

We had never hugged, and just stood there breathing in each other’s arms. Had never stayed in the stillness of each other’s bodies, feeling the bones, clutching the muscle, caressing the planes of skin. I felt my own heartbeat start to shift in time to his, matching his slower rhythm until our chests beat together as one pulse. 

I held him.

Not even that day after taking the canoe out on Wonder, when I had hugged him afterwards by the shore and felt his chest shake in my arms – not even then, had it felt like this. Because every second we had stood there, our heartbeats had stayed out of sync, and each passing second my mind had whispered “ _you need to let go now, you need to let go now, you need to let go_ ,” until I’d finally pulled back and walked two feet away from him back to the truck.

Now I didn’t have to pull away. I didn’t have to let go.

His body surrounded me. It was as if the Denali air itself had taken physical form to hold my skin. As if the snowmelt from the peaks, and the pollen of the wildflowers, and the endless beds of moss were currently covering my body with strength and warmth. I could smell him. That familiar, specific spark of peppercorn and cedar that I used to ache for back in the Canyon, when I would lie awake through the endless winter nights, and clutch empty handfuls of sheets, and think that maybe I should have leapt into the icy bay to join that whale. Maybe I should have gotten on a plane to London. I should have, I should have, I should have . . .

“I’m here,” I heard him whisper. “I’m here now.”

Water stung my eyes. I ran my palms up the hard planes of his back, fingers trailing over his spine. I nodded into his curls and whispered back, “I’m here, too.”

I don’t know who moved first. Our noses were brushing together, sharing hot puffs of breath, and then his mouth was on mine, tongue pressing inside, and heat flooded down my throat and bloomed behind my lungs. It was deeper than any kiss we’d ever shared, even that evening after he’d pressed the shot into my skin with his own bare hands. My tongue was along his, he was tasting my mouth. I breathed nothing but his air, felt nothing but the hot slide of his lips on mine. I gripped his face with my hands, traced the smooth lines of his strong jaw, freshly shaved from his shower, and his chest pressed fiercely against mine in a rhythm of _don’t let go, don’t let go, don’t let go. . ._

I kissed him, slow enough that I didn’t know where my mouth ended and his began. The wet sounds of our tongues and lips filled the cabin’s air. The hushed groans of our breath.

My toes curled.

“Come with me,” I whispered against his mouth. I held him by his sides and started to walk backwards towards my room. He let me lead him. His body was easy and pliant beneath my hands, muscles loose from his shower, and his skin scrubbed and soft. And all the while, with every slow step, his lips never left my own. His breath never stopped dancing with mine, warm and wet and fresh like soap.

I lead him into the bedroom, where the bedside lamp was still turned on from when I’d been unpacking before. Sherlock reached to turn it off without breaking our kiss, but my hand settled on his wrist to stop him.

He frowned at me. I didn’t know how to tell him why I wanted the light kept on without sounding young and ridiculous. That I needed to see him, that I needed him to see me, that I couldn’t lose him to the blurry darkness – the pitch black that I used to long for growing up in my attic. 

I wanted him to see my skin – the way it had wrinkled, and the way it had changed. I wanted to count the freckles on his lower back to make sure they were all still there, that they remembered the year-ago touch of my lips. The small grasp of my hands.

But he looked at me, really looked at me, and something deep glowed in his eyes – something pained, and relieved, and filled with such emotion it was like the banks of the Toklat overflowing with deep blue water, runoff from snow far up in the peaks, softly flooding the wildflowers and moss until it reflected the golden sun.

He let me guide him to the edge of my bed, and he left on the light.

His hands slowly roved up my sides, conforming to the curves and lines of my body and ribs. I let my lungs press out into his waiting palms. My body was slowly relearning the touch of his skin, remembering how to be held, re-melding to the strong lines of his bones. 

He was breathing harder, now, and the sound of it burned in a rolling fire to the base of my spine. He moaned my name when I pulled him closer to me by his hips.

I gasped for air. He was hard.

Hard just from kissing me, with my body in his arms. Hard and pressing out through his underwear and his soft flannel pants. Hard and hot like steel against the top of my thighs. I looked down at the outline of him straining the fabric, listened to the soft, uncontrolled moans coming from the back of his throat when he realized what I was looking at, that I was seeing that he wanted me, that I made him erect, lose control, _wanting_. . .

My fingers grasped the bottom hem of his shirt before I even realized what I was doing. He sucked in a breath. I froze.

But the second I hesitated, with the shirt hovering just off his skin in my hands, he reached down and pulled it slowly all the way up over his head. His skin shivered, and his nipples pearled at the rush of cool air from my room.

My lungs tightened. I rushed forward and pressed my cheek to the warm plane of his chest as his shirt fell in a heap to the floor. The quick thrum of his heartbeat echoed in my ear, and his ribs expanded beneath my hands, and it was suddenly so horrifying, so painful, that I might have gone the rest of my life without this – without the simple fact that I could touch his bare skin, that I was allowed to hold him and see. 

I rested my face on his chest and simply breathed in deep through my nose. My ears tingled at the sounds of his palms running up my back over my thin shirt. He grasped the top of my arms.

“John,” he said. The vibration of his voice rumbled against my cheek, and when I finally looked up at him, his eyes were nearly black. He swallowed. “We don’t . . . I’m not expecting anything,” he went on in a whisper. And I felt him shift, just barely, so that there was an inch of space between our bodies. So that his erection wasn’t pressing into my skin. “Just, just being here with you, kissing you again, is . . . Anything you w –”

I didn’t wait to hear the end of his sentence. I kissed him. He hummed against my lips.

“Take this off,” I whispered into his mouth. I reached to place his hands down on the bottom hem of my shirt. Without even having to look, I felt his answering smiling against my lips. And as he pulled my shirt up over my head, as I felt my bare skin shiver without the layer of fabric, I knew I wanted to cover him, be covered by him, and wear his body closer than my own muscle and bone. I wanted to hold the warm waist I thought I’d given up forever in the middle of the raining tundra. 

I wanted him to touch the stomach and chest and ribs that I thought no other human being would ever again see.

His skin was so soft against my own, still warm from the shower. That time, when he kissed me, it was desperate and deep. I tasted his moan on my own tongue, and I shivered at the wet heat of his open mouth. He was starting to pull me back towards the bed, pulling my sides so I would lay down on top of him and press him into the sheets. My body felt reckless and wild as I reached down and shoved his flannel bottoms off his hips, listening to them pool around his ankles on the floor, then I laughed under my breath as he nearly fell over trying to yank off and step out of his underwear, too.

Just like that, he was naked. Naked in my room for the first time in nearly a year. My throat felt too tight.

And he was pulling me, still, pulling me towards him as he started to lie back on the bed. He wanted me to cover him, wanted to feel the weight of my body, and he didn’t even care that I was still wearing sweatpants and boxers. He was still hard for me, leaking, and his glowing skin looked breathtakingly beautiful against my plain sheets.

And it was in that moment, that moment when he was still pulling me down towards his bare skin, that I knew what I wanted.

I stood up straight, leaving him lying back on the bed. His chest was heaving, curls spread over my pillow, eyes dark. The light from the bedside lamp poured pools of gold across his stomach and ribs – cast shadows in the dips of his thighs. Illuminated the wetness starting to slowly drip from his erection.

He frowned and held up a hand. “John?”

I looked straight into his eyes, and suddenly nothing else existed in the world. There was nothing to be afraid of in his eyes, nothing to point between my legs, nothing to laugh.

I placed my hands on the waistband of my sweatpants and boxers, and I took a deep breath, and I pushed the fabric down.

Naked.

For the first time in my entire forty-one years of life, since I was a baby in a crib, I was willingly, completely naked. Standing tall in front of another breathing person with my bare skin. My boxers and sweatpants pooled around my feet on the cold floor. 

His eyes never left my own. I clenched my fists to keep from reaching over to cover my genitals, or cover my face. I watched his throat move as he swallowed, and his erection was still straining towards his stomach and hard. If anything, it was harder.

I forced myself to breathe. It was the only sound in the silent air.

“Look at me,” I said, not even a whisper, just barely a sound on my breath.

I stood tall as his gaze slowly traveled down my body, down over my chest, across my stomach, to the tops of my thighs. He looked at my knees, at my ribs, and the muscle of my forearm.

He looked at my pubic hair. He looked at the place where I was already aching and hard. Looked at it with his own two eyes, and then he looked back up at my face, where my jaw was clenched, and he said my name, a wet sound, in a way that chased every last doubt I had far away.

He held out his hand for me, and I took it. I climbed onto the bed, onto my familiar lonely sheets, except he was there now, keeping them warm, pulling my body towards his own. I crouched above him, hovering, and his huge hand was on my cheek. I shivered at the heat of his kiss, the desperate groan in the back of his throat.

I was wet. I wanted to feel . . . I wanted –

I looked down at where my own body was hovering just above his cock. His eyes were huge and black. 

“Do we need . . .?” I whispered.

He shook his head, and his voice was breathy and low. “There’s been no one.” He ran his hand up my arm, fingers trailing over the lines of muscle and bone. “Only you.”

It was the last thing I needed to know. With every ounce of strength I had left in my body, I lowered myself down, slowly, so slowly, until my bare skin was heavy and lying against his own.

It was indescribable. 

We both moaned out loud at the contact. I could never have imagined the heat of his erection against my bare skin, the way his pubic hair tangled with mine, the way my wetness would leak onto the hard skin of his cock. There was no way I could have ever fantasized, no way I could have ever known.

There was nothing between us. He felt every inch of me. He clung to it.

His kisses drowned me, his hands caressed me, he let me rub the full weight of myself along his bare skin. The room filled with the smell of sweat and sex as I rubbed my own hardness along his erection, trailing from the root to the tip, and he was gasping, freely moaning, desperately panting against the skin of my neck. 

And we were moving together, rocking, deep rhythm and heat and the strength in his thighs. . .

He whined when I wound my fingers through his curls, and my eyes grew wet as the forgotten memory of their touch shocked through my brain.

I had walked away from it, I had turned my back in the tundra and hiked back alone to the empty road, I had lost, I had _missed_ . . .

“John . . .” I heard him groaning beneath me. I kissed him hungrily, devouring his mouth, swallowing his words, sweat dripping at the places where our skin touched. I was pulsing between my thighs where I could feel his bare erection against my body. I couldn’t breathe unless my mouth was touching his.

“John, what do you . . .” he whispered. I kissed him again. Fingers through curls. “I want to . . .” he was panting. His hands trailed down my spine. “To . . . to touch you,” he moaned. I curled my arm beneath the low of his back. “Fuck . . . I want . . .Christ . . . John, wait –” He put a hand in the middle of my chest, still and firm, and I leaned up on my elbow away from his body. 

He paused for a moment and looked at me. I saw my own face reflected in his grey eyes. Then he whispered, through labored breaths, “I need to know what’s alright.”

His hands were gently holding either side of my waist.

Like an explosion, like a blast of wind, I realized what he was trying to say. For one eternal moment, the breathless haze of our desire suddenly cleared.

And I paused, waiting for the ice to freeze along my spine. I waited, and I waited, and I waited.

I waited to feel back in that Canyonlands shower, back at the kitchen table that last morning I saw my parents, back in the alley. I waited to feel back in the hot barn.

I waited, and he waited for me.

But when it didn’t come, when I still craved him with every bone in my body, and knew that I wasn’t anywhere else except here, with him, in my own bed, I sighed into the silence and looked deep into his eyes. The delicate skin around his mouth was pink from my beard. His lips were wet.

“Just . . .” I touched his face, running my thumb along his bottom lip. “Just don’t . . . go inside,” I said. My voice broke on the last word. It felt like I had just taken a microphone and announced to an entire Kantishna bus tour that I was gay. That I wasn’t at all who they thought. That I wasn’t . . . I wasn’t --

He nodded quickly. His eyes were half-lidded. “Yes . . . alright, yes . . ."

He was still hard; I could feel his erection hot against my thigh. His palms held my skin.

And I realized, in a sudden, breathtaking moment, that I was smiling, nearly laughing. A twenty-year-old weight I hadn’t even known I’d been carrying was gone from my shoulders, completely disappeared – just like that. 

He was still lying still beneath me, waiting for what I wanted to do. He was still naked in my bed.

“John,” he breathed, as my fingertips traced his lips.

He still called me John.

I knew that everything had changed.

I looked at him, then I reached down, and I grasped his full erection in my palm, shivering at the forgotten weight and heat of it in my fingers. “Touch me,” I breathed. My lips smiled against his in an open kiss, and his body arched up into my hand. He groaned as I whispered into his ear, “God, Sherlock, I’ve wanted . . . I’ve missed . . .touch me –”

I was flying. I was at the peak of Denali with fluttering wings. I had captured the sun.

I felt his fingers press briefly against the top of my thigh, a question and a warning, and when I nodded against his mouth, sighing across his wet lips, Sherlock reached between our warm bodies, pressed his lips to the soft place below my ear, and he touched me.

He touched my bare skin with his fingers, stroking along the length of me, rubbing the heel of his hand through my hair. I clung to him and let myself moan from deep in my chest, trying to unleash the desperate power that came from lying heavy in his arms and thrumming between my legs at the stroke of his fingers – the firm touch of his hand, the heat and softness of his skin. 

It was nothing like any of the times when he’d touched me there before – back when a layer of thin fabric had been between us. When he could feel me grow hard, and see me shudder, but he couldn’t feel the pulse of my building orgasm against the bare pads of his fingers. He couldn’t feel the heat of my living body, the desperate thrum of my blood and muscle. 

He circled me with the pad of his finger. He traced my length, dragged his finger over my swollen tip. Then he brought his finger up to his tongue. He closed his wet lips around it, sucked, and hummed.

My vision went grey, and every inch of my skin shivered. I couldn’t breathe.

“Fuck, come here,” I heard myself moaning. I pulled him down on top of me, devouring every inch of him with my arms. He sighed when I held him close. “Come on, come here. . .”

He kissed my mouth, my swollen lips, down the side of my neck, across my chest. Nothing existed on earth but the open, wet slide of his lips, the gentle suck of his kisses, the wet trail from his tongue. I sank back into the mattress and groaned as his huge hands caressed the planes of my ribs, holding my body together, and his curls tickled across my skin.

I had missed them, the silky feel of them as they dragged across my chest, the chest that he now fully understood, fully knew. Jesus Christ, how I’d missed them . . .

He hummed when his tongue traced the outline of my hipbone, then he looked up at me, with his chin just inches from my pubic hair, and he paused.

The muscles in his back flexed beneath my palms when he looked up at my face. He was miles of skin, miles of bones, oceans and oceans of tumbling curls. 

He was a pair of eyes piercing through my dim cabin light – the first time I saw the Northern Lights whispering above the mountains through the fog.

“I want to suck you,” I watched his swollen lips say.

I sucked in a breath and blinked. My chest was still panting, and my palms sweat. “What . . . you brought . . .?”

Because I couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe that the thing, the cock, which felt like it had last existed two hundred years ago - it couldn’t possibly be here in my room, brought back with him, within my reach . . .

He held my gaze and shook his head. “It’s back in London. I didn’t . . . well, obviously, I didn’t know, didn’t want to hope –”

The air was silent.

The realization of what he meant dawned on me all at once.

“You want to . . .” I whispered, afraid to finish the words – afraid that he would hear them, and cringe, and say back, “ _No, obviously not that --_ ”

“Yes,” he said, breathless. His thumbs rubbed slow lines across my stomach. “Only if you want.”

I stared at him. I couldn’t believe what he was saying.

He must have read the thoughts on my face, because I watched his throat pulse as he swallowed, then he crawled back up to me so he was looking straight down at my face. His fingertips settled in my beard, and I shivered at the weight of him as he allowed his chest to press fully against mine. His back was damp with sweat.

There was a frown line between his eyes.

He opened his mouth to speak, but before he could say anything, I leaned up to kiss him softly on the mouth, letting my lips linger until the taste of his breath covered the surface of my tongue. When I lay back on the pillow, his face was open and clear.

He licked his lips. “I told myself the whole way back on the bus that I would do everything not to make the same mistakes again –”

“You had that thought while explaining the difference between animal scat to Alexander?”

He huffed and looked up at the ceiling. “Well, I can have two coherent thoughts at once. It’s physically possible –”

I grinned and traced my hand up his spine. “Right, so you were thinking . . .”

He took a deep breath, and I felt the warmth of it blow gently across my cheek. “I don’t . . . I don’t want to keep things from you. To hold back from what I want you to know, out of . . . because I can’t . . .”

I rested my nose against his and closed my eyes. I nodded so he could feel my answer. My throat was too tight to speak.

“And what I want you to know, right now,” he finally went on in a whisper, “Is that . . . if you want me to, if you . . . if you’d like . . . I want to taste you . . there. I want to feel you in my mouth. It’s something I would like to do, if you wanted it.”

I squeezed my eyes and grounded myself in the weight of his body on mine. He pressed his nose into my cheek, and he waited, perfectly still.

Of course I wanted it. 

I wanted it with an intensity I had never even realized until he was suddenly naked, asking me, and my stomach and the tops of my thighs were still damp from the presses of his lips. I wanted to fuck his mouth, look down at the sight of his lips against my bare skin. No black straps in sight.

But I had to make sure.

“What, exactly, do you want?” I asked him, barely whispered to him, and I hated how soft my voice sounded, how small. I traced my fingers up his spine so he could try to understand what I meant – what I needed him to say.

He paused, then he slowly rolled his hips across my body, pressing his cock into my skin as it grew warm again and filled. My eyes flew open, and I gasped, when his tongue traced the outline of my ear.

“I want your cock in my mouth,” he said, in the deepest voice I had ever heard. “Want you between my lips, running down my throat.”

I moaned, and he started to thrust his erection into my hip. It was making him hard, _I_ was making him hard, the thought of doing that, the thought of me. . .

“Want you heavy on my tongue.” He softly bit the skin on my neck. “Taste you when you’re hard . . .”

“Fuck.” My fingers were wound through his curls. I laughed once under my breath. “God, you –”

I felt his lips smile against my skin where they traced over my collarbone, down to my chest. “I want you in me. . . in my mouth,” he whispered across my ribs. “Just you, just your body. . . I want . . .” he looked back up at me with dark eyes and an open mouth. My stomach shivered from the wet trails of his lips on my skin.

“John,” he whispered, in a tone of voice that seeped straight down into my bloodstream, hunkering warmly in the spaces between my bones, surrounding the air in my lungs.

I didn’t have to make sure anymore.

I turned my head so I could kiss the inside of his wrist which was planted up by my cheek, then I put a steady hand on his shoulder, grasping the firm muscle, and I watched the heat in his eyes, the wash of heavy understanding, as I slowly started to push him down towards my legs.

I closed my eyes as I opened my thighs so he could settle between my legs. I kept my eyes closed as his breath ghosted over my bare skin, tracing the insides of my thighs with heat. His palms traced up my legs, thumbs dipping into my hips, and the air crackled when he paused, with a sigh in the back of his throat.

He breathed across my skin. He drew the scent of me into his nose. His shoulders expanded under my palms.

Then everything exploded.

Warm, tight, heat engulfed my skin. Full lips surrounded me, closing around my body and sucking, licking, pulling me into his mouth. Moaning vibrations at the taste.

He was kissing me there. He was tasting, swallowing, moaning around a part of myself I hadn’t even been able to look at in years – decades. And he was _kissing_ it. Sucking me.

My eyes flew open as prickling heat gathered in the corners. The ceiling became a blur, and I thought maybe I would never take in a full breath ever again. My fingers were wound through his curls, clutching the reality of him buried between my legs, spreading my thighs, urging my back with his hands to arch up into his mouth.

I was in his mouth. In another man’s mouth. In Sherlock Holmes’ mouth.

He closed his lips around me one more time, and I felt huge and hard down his throat. Like I was spreading his lips, dripping onto the back of his tongue, long and erect and pressing up into his open mouth – his mouth which was sighing, moaning around me in a way I’d never before heard, never even heard in my wildest, most reckless fantasies alone in my room in the dark.

I looked down just in time to see his mouth pulling off me. I saw myself, my own bare skin, slowly emerging from between his lips – glistening, pink skin from the heat of his mouth. I was swollen, and hard, and standing up erect from the rest of my body, from the pressure of his lips and tongue.

He closed his eyes and ran his tongue one last time along the length of me, slowly, slowly enough that it made me feel ten times longer than I really was. He sucked on the tip and hummed. I heard him breathe in the scent of my skin.

And it was as if the rest of me, the wet folds of skin that existed in the shadows behind his mouth, they didn’t even exist. They didn’t even matter. Nothing mattered at all except the sight of his head bobbing over my own real skin – bobbing over my cock - which was hard and thrumming and pulsing in pleasure from the tight heat of his mouth.

My heart skipped a beat when I saw him open his eyes. I waited, throat dry, as his eyes traced over the sight of me up close. 

I left my legs open.

He saw everything, saw it all – my hair, and the wetness, and the small part of me he’d been sucking - the part of myself I’d fought for for years, and years, and years. 

He looked at me in the fresh silence, drank in the sight, as if nothing was missing there at all. As if it was exactly what he wanted to see, as if he couldn’t stop looking, as if it was everything . . .

And when he looked up at me, with his wet lips parted, and he met my gaze, I gasped.

He wanted me.

I’d never seen such hunger before in his eyes, such a fierce, hot desire. I felt his body shiver between my legs, watched in awe as his hips rolled against the bed, getting himself off. He reached up and gripped my hand on the sheets.

“John,” he whispered, in a rough, broken voice. 

I blinked hard to keep the water out of my eyes. I held his gaze. “God . . .”

He was panting. “Is it . . . can I . . .?”

I threw back my head on the pillow and shook at the force of my words. “Suck me.”

I heard him groan. Felt the drag of his lips back on my skin. 

“Take me,” I heard myself breathe. I cupped the back of his bobbing head with my palm. “Fuck, suck me . . . yes . . .”

He pulled off to curse under his breath. The word vibrated against my skin.

“Sherlock,” I gasped.

I was lost.

We moved together, rolling as I pressed up between his lips. His hands were on my hips, and his nose was buried in my hair, and my entire body lit up at the shocking heat of his sucking tongue along my hard skin, his hot breath and his cries, the shake of the mattress as he ground his own erection down into the sheets. 

I heard myself whispering, moaning, gasping at the caress of his mouth against my body. Warmth was building in my thighs, pooling deep in my gut, as I pressed, and fucked, and arched up against the wet heat of his tongue. I was laid open, I was completely bare, I was more naked than I’d ever been in my life. And yet I was surrounded by him, consumed, held safe and strong in the lines of his arms, grounded beneath his weight. 

I was standing up at the peak, way up in the clouds, and he was holding my hand beside me. I was not going to fall.

I knew when my toes curled that I was about to come – come straight down his throat, between his lips, across his lapping tongue. I looked down again at the sight of myself in his mouth, staring down over the hard, smooth planes of my flat chest, down over the muscles of my stomach which clenched as I rolled my hips up towards his bobbing head, his sucking lips. I saw the long, endless line of his strong back in the warm light of the lamp, shadows spilling across his muscles and ribs. The full curves of his ass as he dragged his cock across the sheets. 

“I’m gonna . . .” I heard myself gasp. My fingers tightened in his curls. “Fuck, I’m gonna –”

“Yes,” he cried around me. He sucked me harder. Wetter. “Christ, yes . . .”

But I wanted . . . I wanted to see –

I reached down for his shoulders and pulled. “Come on, up here,” I panted. “Up here, with me.”

He gave me one last wet kiss between my thighs, engulfed me in messy heat, before he flung himself up onto my chest and came down hard on my body. He kissed me before I could fully breathe, pushing his tongue straight into my mouth. His hands gripped my shoulders.

I tasted myself.

I choked back a moan, a cry, maybe even a sob. I was tasting myself in his mouth, something that was impossible, inconceivable – something I had known, just like I knew I was meant to be a Ranger, would never, ever happen in my life. Something that was relegated to midnight dreams. Those twilight hours when I rolled my hips alone against my sheets.

And yet there he was, licking past my lips, breathing across my tongue, devouring me in an open kiss that tasted of sex, and heat, and _me_. 

I held his face in my hand and rolled us onto our sides. I kept kissing him as I reached down blindly and grabbed the base of his cock.

He nearly yelled. 

He was thick and hot in my hand, hard as steel, harder than I’d ever felt him before. I pulled my fingers along the heavy weight of him. It was going to be hard and fast, blinding, pulsing with the sweat dripping down our skin.

“Come on,” I whispered onto his tongue. “Yeah, come on, come on. . .”

He shook as he fucked up into my fist. He clutched my back, my chest, my sides, my ass. He whimpered when my thumb slid over his dripping slit. “Fuck . . .”

“Come on me,” I gasped. “God, let me feel you . . . let me see –”

“Yes, fuck –”

“Come on me, Sher –"

The words died in my mouth when his fingers suddenly slid over where I was erect. He rubbed me, stroked me, pulled the length of me in his hand to the rhythm of his own hips pressing through the tight hole of my fist. I licked up his neck towards the corner of his mouth. I held his bottom lip between my teeth. I marked his skin with my beard. I tasted his sweat.

“Come on me,” I whispered again, even as I felt my own orgasm building in me, pulsing, crackling like heat between my thighs under the firm pressure of his hand. I felt the muscles of his forearm flexing against my own where I pumped his cock. He dripped onto my palm.

He opened his eyes, piercing blue, shooting straight down into the pit of my chest, the same piece of my soul where I had first whispered ‘John,’ and then I watched, mouth open, as he softly cried and came into my hand.

I tipped over. The sight of him coming apart sent me straight over the edge, pulsing into his hand, covered with the spray of his semen. I told myself his was mixing with my own.

I came.

“John,” I heard him moaning. Hot breath on my neck. “Fuck. . .” 

My body ached in his arms. I opened my eyes to see him looking down at where we still held each other in our hands. My body jerked with each of my heartbeats, pumping blood through my veins as it slowly sizzled through my muscles with the end of my orgasm. 

I put my hand on his hip, trying to catch my breath, then I watched, with something like awe, as he held his own softening cock in his palm and pressed his hips forward so his penis rested straight against my skin.

Breath left my lungs. He softly, gently, traced the tip of himself along my own body, covering me with the remains of his semen, mixing it with the wetness on my tingling skin. I gasped at the sensitivity of his skin on my own, the slow trace of his penis as our bodies softly touched. He cupped himself in his palm and rubbed his thumb gently over my own swollen skin. He held both of us in his hand, and we both stared down at the sight of our bodies pressed together. 

And I didn’t care that I looked different, that I wasn’t the same, that I wasn’t big enough to be lying beside him in his palm.

I didn't care, because he was holding us both, wet with semen, still wet from the spit of his mouth. We were naked, and we were together. We were two men who had just come in each other’s arms, gazes locked. I closed my eyes as my lungs squeezed. My next breath came out wet.

His nose pressed into my forehead, and I listened to him sigh. “I thought I’d lost this,” he whispered, barely a sound. He slowly moved his hand away from where he held us both and moved it up to the center of my chest. I held him close by his back.

“I thought I’d . . . that you were gone, that I’d never –” His voice broke.

“Hey,” I whispered. I moved him so his head was pressed down against my chest. I wrapped him in my arms, breathing in the scent of his curls. He clung to me. His soft penis pressed into my thigh. I felt my own self held close against the skin of his stomach.

“Hey now,” I said again, kissing his forehead. I swallowed hard over a tight throat, then realized that I didn’t even know what to say. No other words formed in my mouth. No words could have any meaning when we were lying naked together. Naked in sweat-covered sheets.

I listened to the slowing rush of his breathing as I held him, and I realized, as he grew heavy, that I didn’t have to say anything different at all. 

“Hey now,” I whispered again, so softly, against his scalp. He held me closer, and I reached over to pull the pushed-off sheet over our bodies, then stretched to the bedside table to shut off the lamp.

The sound of our breathing inhabited the darkness.

I rubbed his back with my palm, and I spoke one more time as I felt him drifting heavily off to sleep, just so he could hear my voice. “Hey now,” I said again, and I felt his fingers twitch against my skin.

Then I closed my tired eyes, and I let my body sink away into the comforting black.

-

I woke up the next morning to a hand shaking my arm.

The early, summer light was spilling through my curtains, burning my swollen eyes, and I tried to blink them open and figure out who I was, where I was, what was happening.

“You’ve a Road Lottery shift starting at six,” I heard in a deep, rough voice.

My eyes shot open.

Sherlock was facing me, eyes wide open, with a lock of frizzy hair draped across his forehead. We were in my bed, and we were both naked, and my skin smelled like sex.

It hadn’t all been a dream.

I groaned as the realization of my work shift suddenly washed over me, drowning my joy. I rubbed a hand over my tired eyes. “Fuck that,” I groaned. I stretched my hands over my head to crack my back. “Fuck, fuck.”

He chuckled, and I relaxed again to find him crawling closer into my arms, resting his cheek on my chest. “It’s only five now,” he said, yawning. “Have a little bit of time.”

He moved his thigh suggestively up my own, and I let out a rough laugh. “Don’t tempt me. I’m already going to die today on my shift.”

And like blinking awake out of a dream, a thick fog, I suddenly fully realized the words coming out of my mouth - everything that happened. That he was lying in my arms, back between my sheets, back in my life. I held him closer around his warm, bare back.

“Actually, this is sort of unbelievable,” I whispered, now serious. He nodded a stubble-covered cheek against my chest and hummed.

I wanted to drift back to sleep, to say fuck it all, and miss my shift, and wake up again hours later with him still in my arms, but then he spoke, “You know, I meant what I said yesterday.”

I lifted my head to look down at him and raised my eyebrows. He met my gaze. “What I said to Alexander, that we both live here now. I meant that.”

Emotion overwhelmed me – an emotion I couldn’t even name. I thought of my cabin, of Lugnut in that field, of the first moment Sherlock Holmes ever stepped up gracefully into my truck. I waited a moment until I was sure I could speak.

“You know,” I said back, not trying to hold back my smile. “I think I could grow to really like London. For part of the year, at least.”

Sherlock’s head shot up. He looked down at me with wide eyes and a wild head of curls. I reached up to tuck one of them behind his ear. 

And suddenly, I was sure. I was sure of everything. Sure of what I’d just said.

His eyes were glistening. “I still get to see your cabin, though, yes?” he asked. “I still get to stay there with you?”

I nodded, overwhelmed, and the back of my throat felt hot. “Of course,” I whispered.

Sherlock frowned. “Well then, I believe I’m supposed to receive some sort of key, now that this is all decided . . .?”

I laughed, surprised, and it felt like I was gazing straight up at the sun. I traced his jaw with my thumb. “Do you really need it?” I asked.

And Sherlock leaned down to kiss me deeply, so deeply I felt it straight down to my very core, to the warm essence of my being. I felt it in the place that knew exactly who I was, and that knew Denali had been my beloved home, and that now knew my home would be wherever I woke up with Sherlock in my arms.

Then he smiled at me, and in a wet voice whispered, “No, I don’t.”

 

\--

 

Molly’s eyebrows rose all the way up her forehead when she opened her front door, hand perched on top of her belly, and noticed Sherlock Holmes standing next to me, with my hand on the small of his back.

Sherlock strode in past her without even a hello. “You’ve an extra guest tonight,” he said, before he started saying something sarcastic to Greg in the kitchen.

Molly watched his back disappear through the kitchen door, then turned back in the doorway and looked at me with wide eyes.

“Really?” she asked, whispering.

I could barely speak as I nodded. “Yeah, really.”

Her face crumpled, and her eyes shone. “Oh, John,” she said, reaching out for me, but I quickly put up a hand and shook my head.

“Don’t start, or I’ll lose it,” I teased her, letting her hear my rough voice, and we shared a look, one that nearly took my breath away, before she nodded with a wet smile and stepped back to let me inside to the warmth.

Twelve days. 

Twelve days since I had taken a step closer to Sherlock through the lifting fog and said, “ _I’m going to kiss you now._ ”

Twelve days of coming home after a shift to Sherlock’s shoes outside my cabin door, of setting off down the Road with his feet up on my dashboard, of waking up with his curls on my pillowcase. Ten days since we made plans to spend a few weeks in my cabin after the end of the season, nine days since Sherlock strode into the bedroom and announced that we were taking a winter vacation down to Kenai Fjords, and eight days since I stood next to Sherlock while he used the landline in the office, speaking with the airline to book us two tickets to London, leaving from Anchorage at the end of November – round-trip tickets with a return flight scheduled for the first day of April the next year.

I hung my coat on the back of Molly’s door, then turned around to the sight of Molly staring daggers at Greg, Greg shrugging his shoulders and asking “What?” and Sherlock looking with extreme interest at the wallpaper. 

“You didn’t tell me?!” Molly demanded, hands on her hips.

Greg rubbed the back of his neck. “Well, I didn’t. . . It wasn’t my news to say . . .I wasn’t sure if –”

“Oh, come off it, Griffin, admit that you hadn’t even figured it out,” Sherlock said from where he was sniffing what Molly had cooking on the stove.

Molly’s eyes bulged from her head. “You didn’t figure it out? Greg, you fucking _live_ with him! You live in the same cabin! How could you not –”

“He keeps odd hours!” Greg cried. “It’s not like I . . . I’ve been working on my own stuff for the end of the season, coming out here to be with you, it’s not my fault I didn’t realize he wasn’t there as much –”

“Wasn’t there at all,” I said, laughing.

“God, you’re impossible,” Molly huffed. She strode past Greg into the kitchen and swatted Sherlock away from his fifth spoonful of the chili she had simmering. “Out, everybody sit down at the table with your hands folded and wait.”

I watched Greg’s eyes shine with happiness as he watched Molly’s tense back over the stove. “Oh come on, don’t ground us . . .” he pleaded.

“Well I need some practice grounding if this baby inherits your self-control,” Molly said, leaning her stomach around the countertop as she reached for bowls. “Or, apparently, your observational skills.”

“I can assure you, Molly,” Sherlock said, grabbing a seat next to me at the table, “I will do everything in my power to insure your child does not inherit Gorlois’ observational skills –”

“Gorlois?” I cut in. “Seriously?”

“ –I once watched him comment on the ‘lack of anything livin’ or breathin’ in an area at the exact same moment he physically walked into the nose of a deer –”

“You _promised_ me you wouldn’t tell anyone that story,” Greg cried, head in his hands on the table. “Jesus, Sherlock, you hold out for over ten years, but you just had to go and tell it now –”

“Hang on,” Molly said, plopping down into her seat with a tired huff. “Why hadn’t the deer run away at the noise of you walking?”

Greg raised his hands. “Thank you! Exactly, thank you. I knew there was a reason I’m with you.”

Sherlock opened his mouth with a frown, probably to explain _exactly_ why the deer somehow hadn’t run away from the noise of the two of them walking, but I shot him a look over my first spoonful of chili, and he glanced over at the sight of Greg kissing Molly across the table before looking back at me with a wink and picking up his spoon.

There was the usual small talk as we ate – end of the season shifts, Greg and Sherlock’s research findings, Molly’s preparations for training the interim head of kennels while she would be gone on maternity leave. 

And all the time, I tried to keep the disbelieving look off my face. That we were there, all around the table, and Molly and Greg _knew_ that Sherlock and I were . . . that we were together. That we had woken up side by side in bed. They knew that we had kissed, had sex. They knew, without a shadow of a doubt, and they were still casually eating dinner with us, talking about end-of-season paperwork and some drama with the winter interns in the kennel office. 

And every time I looked over to try and meet Sherlock’s eyes as we ate, his gaze was already on my face, warm, with an understanding that made me want to leap across the table, hold his face in my hands and kiss him, chili-spiced lips and all.

When Greg stood to take our bowls to the sink, Molly leaned back in her seat and tied her hair up in a loose bun.

“So,” she said, looking at me with an odd look. “The two of you, once the season ends . . .”

I suddenly understood the meaning of her look, the hint of uncertainty, and I looked over at Sherlock who nodded at me with warm eyes. His hand grabbed my knee under the table.

“We’re, uh,” I cleared my throat. “We’re gonna spend some time in Talkeetna once the season is done, back in my cabin. Then we’ll be in Kenai –”

Molly’s eyes lit up. “Greg!” she called over her shoulder. “Greg, we should join them! I’ve been meaning to show you the fjords!”

Greg laughed over the sink. “And watch you slip on glacier ice and fall into the fjords while you’re nine months pregnant? Please, don’t subject me to that. I’ll end up in hospital for anxiety.”

Molly rolled her eyes and looked back at me with a grin. “Next year, then, maybe,” she said. My eyes traced the lines of her soft, glowing face. “Of course, kid.”

She glanced at Sherlock. “And then, after Kenai . . .”

Sherlock sat taller in his chair. “Then we’re going to London.”

Molly’s face fell, even as she tried to hide it. “London?” she repeated. She looked at me with wide eyes. “For . . . for good. . . or?”

“Just for the winter,” I said. Relief washed over her face, and I went on, “I’ll stay with him a few months, at his place. Experience not living in the boondocks for a winter before we come back here for next season.”

Sherlock called towards the sink, “That reminds me, Gerald –”

“You’ve gotta stop –” I tried to say, and Sherlock flashed me a smirk before going on, “Apologies, Giovanni, that reminds me you need to go with me to meet with Dan tomorrow.”

Greg looked over his shoulder and frowned. “Uh-oh, Dan? Doesn’t sound good . . .”

“I’ve got us a job for next season,” Sherlock said, matter-of-factly. “At least, once we meet with Dan I’ll have gotten us a job for next season.”

Molly’s mouth dropped open. “What . . .?”

“Details are boring, Garreth can explain it all to you once everything’s finalized, I’m sure.”

I looked back at Molly, still sitting shocked at the kitchen table. “I promise I didn’t know about this, or else I would have said earlier,” I told her. I leaned forward. “What were you . . . what was going to be your plan? You know . . .”

She nodded, knowing what I was referring to – our conversation what felt like months ago about moving to London. “We only had the winter planned, really,” she said, voice soft. “Staying here so I could oversee the start of winter training, having the baby back in Fairbanks and staying here in my cabin for a few weeks, but after that . . .” She trailed off and shrugged her shoulders.

“Well, that’s all solved now,” Sherlock said quietly, with a softness in his voice I’d never heard him use with another person before.

Molly flashed him a small, still-shocked smile and mouthed “Thank you,” just as Greg returned from finishing the dishes at the sink. 

“Well, I’ll have it out with you later over how the hell you managed to get me a job behind my back,” he said, looking at Sherlock with a mix of fondness and exasperation I’d seen on his face hundreds of times before, “But John, tell me, how do you feel about London?” He sat down and wrapped his arm close around Molly’s shoulders. “Big difference from a place like here, and all. Are you nervous?”

I felt everyone’s eyes on me as I reached for my half-full beer on the table. I could hear Sherlock breathe.

I thought of the three times before in my life I’d ever gotten on a plane. Back and forth to the Canyon with everything I owned in a duffel bag, and dreams of grey eyes still running through my head from the night before. Standing alone in the terminal bound for New York, absolutely terrified, watching the planes take off and land on the runway through the huge windows and wondering how the hell that thing was about to fly me up into the air without crashing. Clutching my backpack to my painfully tied-down chest. Stupidly wishing my dad was there to wave me goodbye onto the flight.

“Honestly,” I said, blinking out of the memory, “I’m not, actually.” I glanced over at Sherlock, who was looking at me as if nobody else in the room was even there. “I mean, I’ve never been, obviously,” I went on. “But, I’m excited. Get to let him lead me around a bit for a change.”

Greg grinned and downed the last of his beer. “Well, I can understand that,” he said, tightening his arm around Molly. “It’s easy to go somewhere brand new if you’re with someone you love. I should know, I agreed to stay in this godforsaken place for the whole bloody winter with her.”

And then, as if on cue, the entire room froze at Greg’s words. 

We all simultaneously realized what he’d just said, “ _with someone you love_ ,” and I watched a blush spread across Greg’s face. “I mean,” he said, sitting upright and looking just over my shoulder at the wall behind us, “Or, well, with a person you’re with . . . that you care about . . . you know what I mean –”

Greg and Molly looked at me with pained faces. The room was awkwardly silent.

Then Sherlock huffed. “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I love John,” he said. He flung his hand at no one in particular while reaching for his beer. “Any idiot could see that.”

I didn’t want to breathe.

If I did, if I made a sound, then the whole scene before me would suddenly vanish – I wouldn’t be in Molly’s warm cabin, with her kind smile, and the familiar smell of her chili. I wouldn’t be sitting across from Greg, who’d become a friend, who knew before anyone else that I was gay, who knew exactly what me and Sherlock probably did in bed.

I wouldn’t be sitting next to Sherlock Holmes, calmly drinking his beer and gazing at the fireplace, seconds after he just uttered the absolutely impossible words, “ _Of course I love John._ ”

I turned to gape at him, every muscle frozen, and then I heard Greg’s sharp inhale break the thick silence.

“Oh, bloody hell, Sherlock, was that the first time you said it?” he cried out.

Molly’s eyes looked ready to bulge out of her head. Sherlock shrugged and set down his empty beer. “’S as good a time as any,” he said back, still completely calm. “It’s not like he didn’t already know.”

And as I still stared at him, frozen, his eyes suddenly flickered over to meet mine. 

I saw everything in his gaze.

I saw thick emotion, churning like the fog from the clearing before it had evaporated into mist. I saw the moment Sherlock woke up alone on the forest floor after a night of being strung out, when he thought that a wolf had been sleeping beside him. I saw his eyes the last moment before I’d turned away from him a year ago out on the tundra. 

I saw a quiet fear, an invisible uncertainty, mixed with the wet look in his eyes that I’d seen reflected back at me twelve days ago from the window of a bus.

I saw his eyes across my kitchen table, red and wet, as he moaned out, “ _But I came back!_ ” The way he looked down at his cigarette out in the river rock when he told me his flight had left twenty minutes ago.

Then he blinked, and it was gone. But I knew that he knew that I had seen.

I swallowed hard and nodded, proud that my eyes stayed dry and clear. It was true, what he had said. It was incomparably true.

“I know,” I said to him. I cleared my throat. “I knew.” And there was an invisible relief through the lines of his shoulders. He nodded once, then stole my half-full beer to take another sip, and that was that.

When I looked back at Greg and Molly, surprised that they were even still in the room, Greg’s mouth was hanging half-open, staring at Sherlock like he was a stranger he’d never met before, and Molly’s wet eyes were fixed on me, full of meaning. I gave her a look that we both knew meant I’d tell her more later.

She gave a secret, soft smile for only me to see, then she sat back and turned to Sherlock, who was still avoiding Greg’s stunned gaze. 

“So, you’ll both still be in Alaska for when the baby comes, yeah?” Molly asked, breaking the silence. She rolled her eyes, then smiled, as Greg leaned down to kiss her belly through her sweater, whispering hello to the little baby inside.

Sherlock hummed. “Depends, really, on the effectiveness and accuracy of your due date, coupled with our travel plans. We already have airline tickets, you know, and a meeting I have to be back for in London –”

“We’ll still be here,” I cut in. I ignored Sherlock’s huff and reached across the table to take Molly’s hand in mine. “We may be down in Kenai when we get the call, but we’ll be there as fast as we can.” I squeezed her fingers. “I promise you, kid.”

The nerves in her eyes cleared, and she looked over at Sherlock with a serious glare, one hand on the top of her belly. “I’m holding you to that,” she said.

And I saw the warmth in his eyes, even as he rolled them and said, “Fine. Yes.”

-

Sherlock kicked off his shoes and put his socked feet up on my dashboard before I even turned on the engine.

It was quiet, comfortably silent between us as I navigated my truck out of the dirt by Molly’s cabin and back onto the Road. The late summer sun was just starting to sink towards the peaks, bathing the horizon line in front of us in purple and gold, and the tops of the seas of pine trees were blowing like waves in the evening breeze. 

I rolled down my window with the old, squeaking crank, then dropped my hand out the side to feel the wind against my palm. Sherlock punched the dashboard with his thumb to turn on the old Jimmy Martin tape.

I took a deep breath, filling my lungs with cedar, with peppercorn, with the mud from the damp tundra, with the fur from the dog kennels as we drove by. The remnants of Molly’s homemade chili which still clung to my lips and hands.

Just as I turned my truck onto the dirt portion of the Road at Savage River, where the endless mountains opened up to a breathtaking drop on our left, I spoke over the soft banjo flowing from my crackling speakers. 

“So, you love me, then,” I said, tapping the outside of my truck door with my fingers to the beat.

I glanced over at Sherlock’s eyes, lit up by the reflection of the sunset as we sped over the rolling hills. “Obviously,” he said, so softly I almost couldn’t hear. 

Almost an entire mile passed, dripping pink clouds fading into the evening fog, before he spoke again. “Was there ever any doubt? In the last few weeks, I mean. . .”

I looked over at him in the seat. The wind was blowing his curls back from his face, and the warm light made his eyelashes look like they were made of pure gold. “No, there wasn’t,” I said. 

He put his hand on my thigh and closed his eyes. I shivered from the heat of his palm. Just when I opened my mouth to say more, he spoke, “You love me, too.”

I laughed. It was more perfect than any speech I could have given him, than any story about the whale, or about the shotgun, or about sleeping a careful foot away from James Sholto in a tent. It was perfect, in a way that was so clear, as clear as the fact that I knew I would eventually tell him all those stories, too. All of them and then some as each day by his side rolled into one more.

I picked up his hand from my thigh and kissed it just as we took the first turn into Polychrome Pass. Light lit up the valleys, illuminating the canyons, bursting across the peaks of snow. I pressed his palm against my lips. “More than the sky is blue,” I finally said.

“The sky isn’t even blue right now,” he said immediately. “It’s gold.”

I turned his hand over and kissed his palm. “Must be a good omen, then.”

Sherlock shrugged, looking resigned. “Well, you know what they say.”

I frowned. “What do who say?”

“You,” Sherlock said. He flung his hand out towards the sunset. “Everyone. The supposed ‘number one rule of any National Park’.”

And before I could turn towards him to ask him what the hell he was trying to say, he looked at me, with the vastness of Alaska reflected in his eyes, and he said in a warm voice, “You should always listen to your Ranger.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I once sat behind "Aexander" and "Natasha" on a green park bus, and saw Alexander's little notebook, and eavesdropped about Natasha's salon back in New York. But no off-duty Rangers were around to answer Alexander's (loud) questions, and the people across the aisle eventually asked him to shush. Above is the experience I wish he could have had.
> 
> As always, all my thanks to all of you for reading, commenting, sharing, and leaving love and support. Related to my author's note at the beginning, if you think Sherlock and John are done with using the strap-on now, after the above scene without it, think again :) John and Sherlock's intimacy in this chapter is not a peak, or a culmination, but merely a continuation. And they will continue to love each other and their bodies in many, many ways.
> 
> I know I've been holding off on comment replies during the writing of this fic to prioritize writing new chapters, but I just wanted to put it out there that I'll be replying (and offering my effusive thanks to all of you) to comments on the next/last chapter as a compromise! You all deserve to be individually thanked for your kind words. I truly, deeply, appreciate hearing from all of you. It heightens my joy of writing and sharing, and makes me fall more and more in love with these characters and community. Lugnut sincerely thanks you from his puppy palace in the sky <3
> 
> Next time: The last chapter! A little epilogue, of sorts. You didn't think we wouldn't get to meet Molly and Greg's baby, did you?


	16. December 1992

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bluegrass: Listen to Ray Wylie Hubbard sing "Stone Blind Horses" [HERE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LHE1DeXvlk/).
> 
> Sarah Jarosz: Listen to "Left Home" [HERE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBEJgYJ1XxY/).
> 
> Also, because it's the song I listened to most when picturing John and Sherlock's happy ending, give a re-listen to "Green Lights" [HERE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1gPUlO70O8/).
> 
>  
> 
> We made it - the final chapter! Thank you so much for joining me on John's journey. 
> 
> Heads up: brief, off-screen reference to John having issues at the airport with his ID, since it features his dead name and the wrong gender. You'll see it coming when they get to the Fairbanks airport.
> 
> Sit back, dream of Denali, give those songs a listen, and enjoy <3

December 1992

 

The sudden knock at the door startled me so badly I smacked my head on the bottom of the upper bunk.

“Fuck!” I hissed, grabbing my throbbing skull.

Sherlock chuckled underneath me. “Well, not anymore, it seems.”

I opened my eyes again to look down at him. He was still wearing all his snow-gear and coat, full scarf and hat and one hand in a thick glove. His long underwear and snow pants were shoved down and tangled around one of his ankles, and his other bare foot was hooked up on one of the wooden rungs of the upper bunk.

And I was still sunk deep inside him, erect cock emerging from the rest of my fully clothed layers, with sweat dripping down my neck, and all our gear in a disorganized, heaping pile just inside the door.

We hadn’t really planned it that way. 

The day Sherlock had asked me, looking oddly down at his hands holding my own damn coffee mug as we walked to the truck, whether I had ever thought about seeing Kenai in the winter, an idea sparked in my mind. That evening I searched for nearly an hour through my stuffed folder of old papers until I found a number written on the back of a five-year-old water damaged Denali park map. I’d snuck into the offices when Sherlock was off with Greg and listened to the line ring, expecting it to ring forever, or be disconnected, or be someone else, and instead I was pleasantly surprised to hear Mike’s familiar voice pick up on the other end of the phone.

When I could finally get to my real point, after nearly fifteen minutes of small talk, hearing all about his last five years living in the cabin he built for himself down in Seward, how it was driving busses and maintenance trucks for Kenai Fjords National Park in the summer, I finally asked him if he thought he could do me a huge favor, and if the old trapper cabin near Exit Glacier was still available to stay in overnight for winter trekkers. 

An hour later I had a full update of five-years’ worth of Mike’s life, a phone number for the Kenai Ranger station to check the weather before we arrived, and a full list of directions for how to snowshoe to the trapper cabin, if the avalanche risk was low enough by the time we got there.

It was low enough, and the skies were clear blue, and so Sherlock and I had spent nearly nine hours trekking in across the snow and glaciers, surrounded by nothing but crystal white with the occasional shivering tree. It was endless rolling grey, pierced by crystal pockets of icy blue. It was Sherlock’s strong limbs outlined by the vastness of a blinding horizon, shimmering against the open sky and rising towards the distant peaks.

And I was right there with him, every step, traversing what felt like the end of the earth side by side, silently reading each other’s bodies, until we finally came upon the little wooden cabin peeking up out of the snow.

With a couple hundred yards left, and the cabin a warm, welcoming beacon in the distance, I paused to take some water, and raised my sunglasses so Sherlock could see my eyes. All I could see of his face around his glasses and scarves was a tiny little tip of bright pink nose.

“Don’t tell me you’re stopping for a rest,” he moaned. I stood there without moving, gazing out at the white horizon. His voice was muffled through his scarf. “It’s literally right there, John. That big brown structure. The only thing that isn’t white.”

I smirked behind my own scarf and tore my gaze away from the distant falling snow, then reached out for his hand. Our gloved fingers seemed to grow warm together. “Not resting, smartass. Just. . .I wanna tell you something.”

He ripped off his sunglasses with his gloved hands so I could catch his incredulous look. “Seriously? Right now? You couldn’t just wait ten minutes until we’re inside with a fire where it’s warm?”

I licked my lips. I meant to tell him the little speech I had prepared over the course of the long day, about how special it was to be out there with him, showing him what had always before been my own private beauty of Alaska in the wintertime. How these last weeks by his side again had been bliss. How waking up every morning next to him back in Talkeetna had made my throat tight, every time. 

How he’d made my cabin bedsheets smell like peppercorn and cedar. How I heard his breathing beside me when I woke up and stared at the ceiling in the darkness, remembering that night I had begged the long night for someone to come, for anyone to stay, for warm hands on my skin, and how I’d whispered the story of that lonely night to him through the silence while he dreamed.

I planned to tell him that I was sorry I hadn’t really been in the mood for sex over the last two weeks. How it was somehow the impending stress of London on my mind, weighing heavily in my chest, making me keep my clothes on. How it didn’t have anything to do with him, even though he always said it was fine, and even though he tried to hide the confused look of hurt in his eyes whenever I pulled away and just held him in my arms instead.

I was going to tell him all of that, and see what he said in return. And maybe, just maybe, if my chest felt lighter, and if the mood felt right. . . if the weight of it all was gone from my skin, maybe later that night, when we were warm and fed, I would let him know exactly what I was wearing under my clothes – those straps I’d slipped on in a moment of madness before we set out for our trek, thinking “ _just in case, probably not, it’s ridiculous, but just in case._ ”

He looked gorgeous in the waning sun reflecting off the sea of pure snow. He was cold, and tired, and irritated at me for making us stop when the cabin was finally in sight. He had just trekked nine hours through the snow and ice so I could rectify the fact that I had always, for ten years, walked through a wintertime Alaska alone.

He was everything I had fallen desperately in love with over two endless years. He was my gorgeous, ridiculous man, with a little pink nose. And God, I wanted him.

And I realized that everything I had wanted say, I could say without opening my mouth at all.

So I didn’t answer him, but instead I pulled down my own scarf, then lifted his hand towards my face so I could remove his glove with my teeth. He huffed when I dropped it down into the thick snow.

And then I slowly, gently, moved his hand up under the bottom of my heavy jacket and warm layers, towards the waistband of my snow pants, and towards a little strip of my bare skin.

“What are you --?” he started to ask through his scarf, and then I caught the quick exhale through his nose, the gasp in his chest, when his fingertips found the smallest revealed edge of black leather. I shivered at the touch of his cold fingers against my uncovered body, tracing the strap peeking out above the top of my long underwear and boxers.

A gust of fresh wind and snow blew with a roar between us. “How . . .?” he said, voice breathy and low.

I took a step closer, so he could feel the puffs of my breath against his nose. “Not wearing all of it, obviously,” I said. “But . . . I can be.” I softly cleared my throat. “Once we get inside that door.”

His grey eyes, once the color of the surrounding glaciers, pooled black. His fingertips slowly traced the leather as he leaned closer to me, pulled down his scarf from his face, and licked his chapped lips. He spoke over the howl of the wind. 

“John. . . Christ, John, I. . .” he said, practically growled, and heat sang up my spine.

And I thought maybe we were about to go at it, right then and there. That I would take him in my arms, press him down hard into the snow, and cover him with the warmth of my body, holding him against the fresh white bed of the earth. I thought of all those short winter days I would just sit in my Talkeetna cabin and stare out the windows, an unread book in my hands, marveling and paralyzed at the fact that the fresh snow on my land never had more than one pair of footprints in it all season.

I wanted to hear the way his sighs would echo across the ice.

But then he blinked, and quickly took a half-step back in the snow. 

“Are you . . . you’re sure about this?” he suddenly asked. “This isn’t . . . You don’t have to do this for me. You know I don’t care . . . well, of course I care. About you. I care. But, whether we – it doesn’t matter to me. As long as you’re alright, and we’re alright, we don’t have to . . . there isn’t –”

I cut him off by placing my thumb over his lips. His breath instantly warmed the tip. His eyes were the first fresh snowfall I ever woke up to see softly falling over the Canyon.

“I know,” I whispered, stepping closer. “All of that, I know.”

He lowered his forehead to mine, and we stood there huddled in the blinding snow and wind. His breath fogged across my face, and my palm warmed over the skin of his cheek. 

I wanted to stand there forever. Let us freeze in the snow, our bodies turn to ice, and everyone who chanced by our frozen forms could see that he had been mine. That I had been his. And that way we would never have to leave, get on a plane, and go to London. I would never have leave the endless, empty white horizon.

And he could never leave me.

“It’s just London,” I finally said, keeping my eyes closed. I swallowed over a dry throat. “In Talkeetna, it didn’t . . . it still felt so far off. We had this trip in between, and seeing Molly and Greg. The baby, when it comes. Now that we’re here, I . . . it’s finally real. It’s the next thing.”

I felt his hands on my shoulders, gripping me through my layers. He waited until I opened my eyes, and I nearly gasped at the piercing blue of his own –now like two crystal glaciers reflecting the light of the fresh sun onto my face. Snowflakes settled in his lashes. 

“John, listen to me,” he said. “Nothing is set in stone. There isn’t . . . We could still stay here, if you wanted. We have enough money. Your cabin is still there. I could take a leave of absence until my work starts again in the Park in April. You know I would do that . . . that – that nothing is more important.”

His voice was rough, and the desperate sound of it suddenly warmed me deep in my bones, banishing away the chill of the icy, wet cold. I felt my mouth turn up into a grin.

“I know – I know you would,” I whispered. I could feel my beard starting to freeze. “That’s exactly why I still want to go.”

His eyes glowed warm, shining brighter than the brilliant snow, and I laughed under my breath as he swooped down to kiss me, dragging the hot air of his breath across my cold lips until I felt warmth pour down my throat. I pulled him down for one more kiss when he started to pull back. The air fogged from our panting. I tasted his warm tongue – the breathless, unbelievably close intimacy of his mouth touching my own.

“John,” he whispered. “John, you are . . .”

I kissed the rest of the sentence on his lips – his lips which I had watched kiss my hands, tracing the bones and the veins, while lying in the very cabin I had built with them from the ground up. The hands that had gripped the wood railing over the cloudy Seattle sea. The hands that my dad had guided over the smooth lines of the gun when he taught me to shoot.

And my hands hadn’t looked too small as I watched my fingers disappear one by one into his wet mouth.

“So,” he said eventually with wet pink lips after we parted. His eyes glanced down at my waist. He raised his eyebrows.

I laughed. “Eager, are you?”

He turned up his nose and sniffed. “Well you’re the one who started it, wearing that under all your clothes on this ridiculous hike, stopping us less than half a kilometer from the cabin just because you couldn’t wait until we got –”

His words died when I pressed my palm against his snowpants over his cock. I stroked him, rough and firm, knowing that through the layers of clothes he was growing harder from my touch. 

A moan escaped his throat.

I could hardly believe myself. I was standing there, in the middle of the glaciers, with my hand between another man’s legs. I was kissing him, talking about sex, wearing leather straps underneath my clothes with an erect cock packed safely away in my decade-old pack strapped to my back.

I felt bold and wild and ridiculous. I felt twenty-years-old.

My chest was achingly, perfectly, beautifully flat against his own.

I let the heat flood my eyes, let it fizzle up from where it was starting to pulse deep in my belly. 

“What are you waiting for, then?” 

Sherlock gave me one last look through the haze of desire in his eyes, one last silent question. I gazed back at him, and I traced my fingers over his cock, and I nodded.

I expected him to swoop down and kiss me, or say something snarky, or reach out to touch me right back, right then and there in the snow. But instead he suddenly leapt away from my hand, bent to snatch his trekking poles and glove from where they’d been resting in the snow, and started speed-walking in his snowshoes towards the cabin on the horizon.

“Sherlock!” I called out to him, but he barely even turned his head over his shoulder as he yelled back for me to get a move on or else he would leave me to sleep out in the snow for the night.

I rucked my scarf back up over my face and followed him, breathless, nearly tripping over myself through the thick snow, gulping down the icy air into my lungs and laughing like a kid up at the sky. My lungs burned with the cold air, and the wind bit at my exposed cheeks. I couldn’t even remember the last time I had run like that just for fun in the snow.

When I finally caught up with him, just as we were walking up to the cabin door, I grabbed him, walked him back into the wall, and pinned him in a deep kiss, gasping into his mouth. Our heartbeats exploded against each other, racing in time. He reached down and grabbed huge handfuls of my ass.

We’d barely parted for long enough to slam the door behind us, kick off our snow shoes, and drop all our gear into a pile before Sherlock was ripping off his shoes and pants, and I was digging frantically through my pack, finally unzipping my pants to shove the cock through the ring.

He flung himself on the lower bunk of the old wooden bed with a grunt, making the thin mattress cry out and the wood creak, and he’d barely gotten his foot hooked up on the rungs before my spit-wet fingers were pressing into his hole in one long slide.

It was rougher than we’d ever done it, rougher even than that one night lifetimes ago in the tent beneath the raging storm, that first time I’d ever let the wildness grab hold of me. He cried out at the sting, then reached out for my thighs to pull me closer, driving me deeper into himself. His long neck flung back, hints of bare, pale skin visible above his jacket and scarf.

“Fucking look at you,” I whispered. “God, the look of you –”

“Get in me,” he groaned. He hacked spit onto the palm of his hand and reached down to pump it over the cock. “Deep. Hard. Come on.”

“Fuck, you should hear yourself, begging, begging me for it –”

“You in me, now. . . Christ, John. . .” He moaned, and the sound of it exploded up my spine, a desperation I couldn’t remember ever hearing in his voice, and it was for _me_.

“Take me,” he whispered as I lined myself up. The air punched from my lungs. “Come on, take me . . . in me . . . Yes – open me . . . _oh_. . . yes –"

I’d just pressed inside him, sinking fast and deep into his body, easing into the pulsing heat of him and sighing at the sound of his thick moan across my lips – I’d just pumped into him, laughed into his mouth, gazed breathlessly into his shining eyes, fucked him on his back while he cried out and arched his hips, when that sudden knock banged against the wooden door with a harsh slam.

I was still cradling the back of my head when Sherlock sighed and moved his hips, so I could slowly ease out of him. He brought his leg back down to the thin bunkbed cot with a great flop.

The person knocked again, louder, and I heard a muffled voice on the other side of the door, trying to call out to us over the sound of the roaring wind beyond.

“Maybe if we ignore him he’ll go away,” Sherlock whispered. Sweat was already dripping down the sides of his face, even though we hadn’t even stopped to set up a fire in the cabin.

I stared down at him, taking a few more precious moments to trace the lines of his swollen lips, then I reluctantly reached down to ease the cock out of the straps, re-zipping up my pants. 

Another loud knock, and even louder yelling. I smiled sadly at him, and I let him read the full disappointment in my eyes – that I had truly wanted this, been ready for it. That none of it had ever been a show. 

More banging.

“Somehow I doubt that,” I said.

We shared one last look, one that I felt was pained, before Sherlock leaned up to place a soft kiss on my mouth. “We’ll continue this later, Ranger,” he said, pressing his lips into my beard.

I cupped his cheek and brought my lips to his forehead. “I’ll hold you to that.”

By the time I finally opened the front door, only about two minutes had passed since the first knock. We were both fully clothed again, and the cock was safely shoved back in my bag. I frantically ran my fingers through my hair as I pulled back the door against the rough wind.

A man was standing on the other side, fully bundled up against the incoming storm. I eyed the official NPS patch sewn to the outer arm of his winter coat.

“Jesus fuck of all hell, the fuck you two doin’ in there you couldn’t open the door after one knock? Damn near froze my balls off waitin’ for ya to walk five feet.”

I glanced down quickly at myself one more time, suddenly irrationally terrified that I still had my pants unzipped, or that the cock was still somehow between my legs, or that Sherlock would still be sprawled out half-naked on the bunk bed behind me with his fingers deep in his own ass.

I glanced over my shoulder. He was fully clothed, leaning against the cabin wall with his hands in his pockets.

“Yeah, uh, sorry bout that,” I said with a hand on the back of my neck. “Just, exhausted from the trip. Getting settled in – couldn’t really hear what was going on out here.”

He gave me a hard look, the hardest look I’d gotten in years. I knew he could smell my bullshit, same as I knew he also wouldn’t be able to guess why I was lying in a million years. I knew his type. I’d been working with them for half my life.

“Right, well,” he finally said, then reached deep into his inside coat pocket, “Won’t intrude on ya by coming inside or nothing. Live in the fire-lookout tower just over the next hill –”

“They keep the fire-lookout staffed in winter?” Sherlock interrupted from leaning against the wall.

The man leaned in the door to glare at him across the cabin. “. . .on enforcement watch,” he finished, gravely. “Lookin’ out for trekkers like yourselves, and keeping this cabin here tidy.”

Sherlock dramatically looked around the dusty, empty room. “And a fine job, sir.”

The man grimaced. He shoved a wadded-up paper towards my chest. “Message came in for me on the radio this mornin. Must’ve been after you two had already left Seward, else they wouldn’t’ve bothered me with it. Reckon you don’t need me to read it out loud for ya.”

I took the paper from his rough, ungloved hands. Fear started curdling in my throat – an unknown worry I’d only felt a few times before in my life. Images flashed through my mind. Sherlock being attacked by a bear if I hadn’t run and screamed to save him that day out on the tundra. Lugnut closing his eyes for the last time on a dog bed without me by his side in the room.

Molly putting a hand over the curve of her belly.

My heart raced in my chest, and I could barely feel my hands. I tore open the taped-shut piece of paper, and my eyes frantically scanned the rough handwriting from the old Ranger, sprawled across the page like the letters were falling off down to the ground.

Instantly I felt a warmth at my back – Sherlock’s silent presence reading over my shoulder.

I read it four whole times before I finally tore my eyes away from the page. The old Ranger was looking like he was about to murder me right there in the doorway, then started to back away towards his own warm fire through the storming cold. 

“Well, got what ya needed, then?” he mumbled.

I nodded, mouth half-open, unable to speak.

Sherlock cleared his throat behind me and extended a hand. “We very much appreciate you delivering the message,” he said calmly. “Your efforts were not for nothing.”

The man grimaced down at Sherlock’s hand, without reaching out to take it. “Yeah, well, next time you go out on a trip, plan it so you’re not waiting on important news, ya hear? Damn near froze my balls off . . . Comin out in a storm like this one. . .” He got a few steps away before he called back over his shoulder, “And Jesus’ sakes learn to answer a door!”

I watched, still stunned, as he gradually disappeared into the snow and fog. I waited until the last glimpse of his old jacket vanished from view, then pulled the door shut in front of me, turned and rested my back against it.

For a long, heavy moment, neither of us moved or spoke. 

Sherlock was eyeing me from the middle of the room, waiting for me to speak first even though both of us had just read the folded-up note.

Out of nowhere, I heard the shattered vase as it smashed against the floor – the one my mom had thrown the day we got home from the clinic with a positive pregnancy test clutched in my sister’s terrified hand. I remembered exactly where I sat on the morning bus, exactly how it had smelled, when I’d taken it three towns over to the little hospital to see her and the new babies, since my mom had claimed there wasn’t any room for me in the half-empty car, and my dad had been too busy trying to drive while sipping his beer to argue with her.

I remembered how she had looked so small in that little white hospital bed. So deflated and fragile, and the twins lying on either side of her in her tired arms had screamed and wailed.

And I thought of Molly Hooper, that first night we had ever really spent time together and gotten drinks. Heard her drink-slurred and happy voice over the din of The Spike’s nightly crowd clear as day, with her knees pressed against mine beneath the sticky table,“ _You know, John, you’re the most mysterious person I ever met. Like . . . you’re like the imaginary best friend I always wanted and never had_ ”.

“She had the baby,” I finally whispered. 

I stared down at my hands as they unfolded the note again, skimming the words as if I was afraid they’d gone and changed in the last minute. It was sparse – just the fact that Molly’d given birth nearly three days ago, but that it had apparently taken a hell of a lot of effort to reach us down in Seward due to some downed phone lines from a storm. That she was healthy, and the baby was well and fine, and they were probably already back in her cabin by the park entrance by the time I had this message in my hands.

Sherlock grinned at me; the warmth of his smile filled the cold, dark room. “Our man there was a bit lacking on details,” he said. “But, it appears that everything went smoothly.”

I shook my head at myself and smiled at the scribbled words. I couldn’t pinpoint what the hot emotion was that was flooding through my chest, why I was suddenly so overcome, so overwhelmed, by a simple fact I’d known was going to happen for the last six months. 

I heard my sister’s screams, the way they’d echoed through the hospital hallways while I sat next to my dad out in the hall.

“I don’t think it was London,” I said. I folded up the paper and put it safe in my pocket, desperately wanting to keep it for some reason.

Sherlock frowned. “What?”

“My . . . what was weighing on me, lately. The reason I felt so . . . out of sorts. It wasn’t London. I think it was just . . . this. Her.” I took a deep breath and rubbed my hands over my face, allowing myself for the first time in years to really remember it all. “You know, my older sister, my sister Harriet, she got pregnant when she was nineteen. Tore my mom apart, and everything . . . everything just went to shit after that. Her own life went to shit – started drinking before the kids were even on bottles, yeah? It’s just . . .” I finally met his eyes, and I saw in them the vast understanding, all the words I couldn’t say.

“Molly’s fine, John,” he said, carefully, as if the words themselves would cause me to break. “She’s with Greg, he’s there, and everything’s fine.”

And suddenly, instead of breaking, I felt relief burst across my face – evaporating the weight I’d been unknowingly carrying for weeks on my shoulders.

“God, she had her baby,” I said again, knowing my eyes were wet, and before I could say anything else, before I could even move, Sherlock’s arms were tightly around me, and I felt his own relief cascading warmth down my neck.

I laughed, a wet sound, and pulled him closer against me. 

“We’ll head back out tomorrow,” he whispered against my skin. 

“You’re sure? I know we planned on –”

“We’ll leave tomorrow,” he said again. I knew I didn’t have to ask him if he was sure again.

That time, when our lips met, the kiss was deep and warm. The mad, frantic, breathless urgency from before had transformed into thick flowing honey down our limbs, fusing my breaths with his, as he guided me back towards the bed and pressed me down onto the thin mattress. My entire spine tingled, my muscles surged and sang, as he traced his wet lips over my skin, slowly unzipped and unbuttoned every one of our layers, until I was completely bare against him, held close in his arms, his curls tickling my chest and neck.

Later, when he rode me, I rubbed my palms over his hips and sides and arched my back up into his willing body. We were both quiet, just breathing, sighs hitching on our breaths, and as I looked up at him in the gathering dark, and watched a pearl of sweat drip down his beautiful chest, I whispered, “I love you,” to another human being for the very first time. Because even after dinner at Greg and Molly’s, even though Sherlock _knew_ , I had never really gotten my lips to form the words.

And he sank down onto me, shifting his weight in his hips, shivering up his spine with his palms tracing my shoulders, before he caught the moan in his throat with a rough whisper that he loved me, too.

 

\--

 

It was only the third time I could ever remember seeing the Park in the dead of winter. 

The view from the helicopter looked down onto a vast world of white and grey, cascading into the distance and clinging to massive, craggy peaks. Wind swirled fog like ghosts through the river valleys and canyons, and if I squinted my eyes I could just make out the tops of sagging, snow-heavy winter trees clinging to the steep slopes.

But, if I was honest, I knew that I was spending far more time watching Sherlock’s captivated face than staring out my own window at the view.

It was Mike, again, who’d pulled through with the helicopter back up to McKinley Park. Neighbor of his was planning on making a supply run sometime in the next week for some Rangers spending the winter in the more remote outposts along Highway 3. When we made it back into Seward from Exit Glacier, exhausted and spent from the day-long trek, it only took about 5 seconds of mentioning that we were the guys who’d gotten the radio call about the baby before the Rangers there were flagging down Mike to get us on the next helicopter run out early in the morning, saving us what could have taken a whole week trying to navigate road and plane travel through the harsh snow.

Sherlock had called Greg using the Ranger station phone before we left to go bunk in a cheap motel in town, letting them know we were on our way.

I’d listened to his end of the conversation – the announcement of our arrival, followed by a quick “yes,” then “no,” and then he hung up when I suspected Greg had been mid-word.

“The fuck was that?” I’d asked him, “You weren’t going to ask any details?”

Sherlock had frowned. “Details? It’s not like we don’t know where Molly’s cabin is, or who’s going to be there –”

“Like the baby’s fucking _name_ ,” I cried. “Is it a boy or a girl, do they need us to bring any food, does the kid have enough clothes?”

Sherlock had rolled his eyes as we made our way down the deserted nighttime Seward street. “Fine, I’ll let you make the ‘new baby phone call’ the next time then, yes? Honestly, John, it’s like you wanted me to cost them ten dollars in a phone bill just to ask questions we’re going to learn the answer to in twelve short hours.”

And I’d suppressed a groan, mixed with a helpless grin, as I followed his long strides on the ice. “You’re impossible,” I’d said, right before I stuck out my toe so he would slip and fall into the icy slush.

The blades from the helicopter as we descended into McKinley Park sent great clouds of grey snow flurrying through the air, drowning us in a fog of white. Our pilot, a woman who’d instantly told us to call her “Mama Dee” when we were introduced at the Seward airfield, and who’d lived her entire life without once leaving the state of Alaska, gave us a thumbs up as we grabbed our small bags and climbed out of our seats.

“Say hello to that lil’ babe now, ya hear?” she called over the still-running engine.

“We really can’t thank you enough,” I yelled back. “You did us such a favor, it means –”

“Aw cut that mushy crap and get on outta here,” she said, smiling. Sherlock gave her one serious nod before we hopped down from the helicopter and jogged away from the cloud of ice. We turned and watched as she ascended back up into the air, swaying a bit with the wind, on her way a few miles north towards Healy for a supply drop before she would touchdown and refuel in Fairbanks. 

I laughed when I glanced over at the wild mess the wind had made of Sherlock’s curls. He frowned dramatically. “Do I amuse you, then?” he asked.

I looked quickly around to make sure we were alone out in the landing field before I wrapped my palm around the back of his neck, rubbing his skin with my thumb. Far off over his shoulder, I saw the distant peaks of the park rising up into the snowy mist, dancing with the grey clouds of the winter sky, all bathed in a glittering, reflective light. 

I saw my home, just behind him. The place I had returned to on the first day of April, itching to feel the gravel beneath my boots, for ten long years.

It was the place where Lugnut had jumped into my arms, and where I had sent him off into the sky. Where I had been sitting alone at a staff meeting campfire when a young kennel intern named Molly Hooper sat next to me on the log. Where I had told someone I was gay for the very first time, looked down at my body and seen a full, erect cock. Where I had lived and worked and dreamed. 

Where I had looked towards my passenger seat to see Sherlock Holmes leaping up in a suit.

And I suddenly knew, looking at the memorized rises and falls of Denali over Sherlock’s shoulder, that London would feel the exact same way, just as long as he was beside me.

“Shall we?” I said.

He turned to look over his shoulder at the endless snow and ice, the beacons of soft light breaking down through the grey sky.

He hefted his pack onto his shoulder and smoothed down the front of his winter coat. “Let’s meet a baby,” he loudly declared, scaring off a nearby ptarmigan as it flapped up into the sky, and I shook my head as I followed him along the path in the snow towards the closed park gates.

-

 

“Ready?”

Sherlock put a hand on my arm to stop me when we were a few steps away from Molly’s front door. Inside I could hear a baby crying, followed by Greg’s low hushed voice mixed with Molly’s soft, tired laugh. 

I knew what he meant. Halfway through our helicopter ride up from Seward, Sherlock had leaned towards me and yelled over the sound of the engine that he felt like he was on his way to meet his own kid, stupid as that sounded. That he was sitting there making plans to babyproof his London apartment in his head. And before he could shake his head at himself again, I put my hand on his thigh, out of view of the pilot, and yelled back that I had already babyproofed my entire Talkeetna cabin in my mind last night.

“That them?” I heard Molly ask from inside, tired excitement in her voice.

Her voice sparked a powerful urge in my chest, a force pulling me forward towards the door, to see her with my own two eyes, and hold her in my arms.

I answered Sherlock by patting his hand with my own, then I squared my shoulders and took the last few steps up to the front door. Before I could even raise my hand to knock, the door swung open, and Greg was suddenly standing before me for the first time in almost three months, with half his hair sticking up and mis-matched socks.

“Well thank Christ you two finally decided to show up,” he said, before he pulled me into a hard bear hug right there in the door.

“Congratulations,” I whispered to him, and he nodded and slapped me once on the back. I felt the emotion tremble in his chest. I also felt Sherlock trying to slip beside us through the door, but he was hardly two steps in before Greg pushed me away from him and grabbed Sherlock’s arm instead.

“Oh no you don’t, come here, you,” he said as he pulled Sherlock into an even fiercer hug, nearly knocking him back down out into the snow.

I shook my head at Sherlock’s silent plea for me to save him, then slipped past them into the cozy warmth of the cabin – a cabin I’d walked into countless times before, hungry for a meal and Molly’s company, only this time the cabin smelled like baby powder instead of homecooked chili, and there was a tiny pair of breathing lungs adding to the whispers Sherlock and Greg were exchanging behind me.

I spotted her almost immediately in the old stuffed chair next to the couch. Her hair was bundled up in a tired bun, and she had dark circles under her eyes across her pale skin, and a huge, stretched-out pullover from Greg over her small frame. The baby was curled up fast asleep now on her chest, cradled in her gentle hands.

She was incomparably beautiful.

“God, look at you, kid,” I whispered, suddenly choked up, and I rushed to her, not even stopping to shed my boots or my jacket, and I leaned down over the chair to press a kiss to her forehead.

The smile she gave me was brilliant and soft. She put her hand around my wrist braced on the arm of the chair. “I’m so happy you came,” she said.

I looked deep in her eyes – thought of that moment when her voice had told me the worst news of my life over the phone earlier that summer. How she had put her hand on my shoulder, not needing to say anything at all, as I processed the fact that my best friend had just slipped away.

“I promised you, didn’t I?” I said, and her eyes glistened as she squeezed my wrist.

Greg came up from behind and thumped me again on the back. His chest was puffed up, radiating pride. “Come on, then, you want to hold the little bugger?”

I stared at him. “I . . . Well, I don’t need to – You know, I wasn’t expecting . . . shouldn’t you wait a few weeks --?”

Molly kicked my shin with her socked foot. “Stop yammering and take your coat off and wash your hands. Come on.”

I glanced quickly at Sherlock, who just shrugged, then went to do as Molly said. My fingers shook as I dried them off on the kitchen towel and rolled up my flannel sleeves. Even though I’d held my sister’s kids a few times before I left, and held a baby or two over the years whenever coworkers came back from maternity leave, it somehow felt like I had never held a baby at all, not once in my life.

I shook my shoulders once to knock some sense into myself before coming back to Molly, who stood up gracefully, like she’d done that holding a sleeping baby a thousand times before, and then held the baby out so she could place them in my arms. 

The warm weight of the child, of _Molly’s_ child, curled up against my chest. Emotion pulsed through me. Her baby’s cheek rested against my chest in a way that was nothing like my sister’s twins had fit there before, back when I hadn’t been flat, and their little bodies had only amplified, like a screaming siren, those parts of my skin I was always desperately trying to hide. It had made me never want to hold them, even when they screamed to be picked up, and my sister begged me with exhausted eyes, irritated that I wouldn’t just come over and help.

Now, though, the little baby fit perfectly against my body, curled up into my warmth, and I could feel the tiny puffs of breath in the hollow of my throat. I stroked the baby’s spine with my finger, feeling the soft, warm curve, breathing in their scent from the wisps of brown hair.

Molly’s hand joined mine stroking the back of the baby’s head. “This is Theo,” she whispered.

Shock rolled through me. 

Shock and a hot, thick emotion that made me clench my jaw to try and catch my breath. I blinked away the sudden water in my eyes so it wouldn’t drip down onto the baby’s head – onto _Theo’s_ head. I knew the breaths coming out through my nose were shaking, and that Molly could hear. For once, I didn’t try to stop them. I wanted her to know, to understand, to somehow see the depth of what she had done.

I kept looking down at Theo’s soft little hairs as I whispered, in a low rough voice, “Oh, Molly. . .” I swallowed hard. “You didn’t . . . God, you didn’t have to do that. . .”

I heard Molly sniff, and her hand rested over mine against her baby’s soft spine, then I looked down across Theo’s sleepy closed eyes, his curled up nose. “Hello, little boy,” I whispered to him, but then Molly made an odd sound in her throat.

I looked up at her, still trying to blink away my wet eyes, and I saw that she had a dry smile on her lips. “We knew that would happen,” she said, with a warm light in her eyes. She looked over at Greg, who’d come to stand by her side. Silently, I could feel Sherlock’s warm presence at my back, looking down at the sleeping baby over my shoulder.

Greg cleared his throat and stroked his fingers across the nape of Molly’s neck. “It’s Theodora, actually,” he said, smiling down at Theo in my arms. The baby started to shift and fuss, and Molly reached out to stroke the back of her head to try and calm. 

I looked up at them both, stunned with an emotion I couldn’t name, could never ever name even if I tried for a thousand years. “A girl?” I asked, barely a sound.

Molly nodded, and shrugged with a little grin, before Greg’s voice filled the fragile, silent communication between us. “Molly here caved and asked to know at the last ultrasound. Doctors said with ‘total certainty’ that it was gonna be a boy. We had the name all picked out . . .” He gave me a soft look, “Actually, we couldn’t settle on a single one until . . . ‘til Molly told me ‘bout your family. Your granddad and your dad. We agreed on that, sure enough.”

Molly reached over gently to take the now crying baby from my arms, rocking her against her chest. “And when our screaming little princess came out a girl . . . Well, Greg here thinks it sounds,” and Molly lifted one hand to make air quotes, “’punk and edgy’ to call her Theo for short, and . . . I don’t know.” She looked up at me with suddenly deep, serious eyes. “It just fits, I thought. I hope . . . You don’t mind? I know it’s a boy’s name for your family, but I thought . . . well it doesn’t really matter, it could go both ways?”

I felt Sherlock’s hand at the bottom of my back. I sucked in a desperate, rough breath to force my lungs to work. I knew that he knew I was only just barely keeping it all together, that I was teetering on the edge of that emotion I could never name.

Theodora’s cries quieted as she curled up in Molly’s arms. Her eyelashes rested against her round, pink cheeks, dotted with a single freckle beneath her left eye. “Of course I don’t mind,” I finally got out. I reached out one more time to stroke my pinky finger along her tiny hand. She grabbed onto me with a surprising grip and didn’t let go.

“God, kid,” I whispered, “how could I ever mind?”

Molly let one tear fall from her tired eyes as she looked up at me from her daughter, as if I was the only person in the room, on the whole earth. I held my breath.

It was the most I’d ever felt seen since Sherlock had taken my face in his hands, and looked down at me in the open tundra, and desperately whispered, “ _John, you are. I know._.” 

And Molly didn’t even know, would probably never know, but she knew enough about me, the most mysterious man she had ever met, to name her beautiful daughter Theo. She knew enough to do that. 

And she whispered back at me, with glistening eyes, “Good. That’s good.”

-

Sherlock and I spent the next hour cooking them a huge casserole from the random bag of groceries Sherlock had mysteriously pulled from his bag. When I’d asked him how the fuck he managed to buy those between Kenai and Molly’s cabin, Sherlock had just irritatingly shrugged and said I needed to allow him to have at least some secrets.

By the time we had the kitchen cleaned and the food cooling on the stove, Sherlock and I turned around to see Molly and Greg both dead asleep on the couch, with little Theo asleep to the world in her crib by Molly’s side.

“Shall we?” Sherlock whispered, motioning to the door.

I nodded, following his logic that we should give them an hour of silent sleep, then tiptoed to grab my coat off the back of the chair before slipping into my boots.

The winter sun had just slipped behind the distant peaks, even though it was still the early afternoon, and I shivered at the burst of grey cold that followed on the heels of the cloudy sunset. We stood side by side on Molly’s small wooden porch, watching for a few minutes as the world around us slowly faded into the mist and grey.

Bits of my life seemed to flash before my eyes, appearing through the dark fog like ghosts before evaporating up into the sky.

I saw Molly’s glowing face as she held her new daughter to her breast. The first time my dad ever called me Ranger, covered in mud and laughing that I’d found the lost cat. The last time I had gripped a wooden railing – the way the salty horizon line had been invisible, just a giant wall of thick grey.

Finally, after almost ten minutes, Sherlock took a deep breath beside me, fogging in the air. He spoke in a low voice out at the dark sea of trees. 

“That’s what your name would have been?” he asked. “Theo?”

I nodded, and my throat choked up again with wet heat. I spoke before I knew my voice would be steady, forcing myself to let Sherlock hear, to let him understand. 

“Theodore, yeah.” I paused and gulped down another breath, fighting against the aching clench in my chest. On the railing, Sherlock’s hand quietly settled over my own. “Watson family name for . . .” I swallowed hard, “for five generations. Dad, granddad, granddad’s dad, and all that.”

“You told Molly that part,” he said softly. It dawned on me that I had never fully confirmed for him whether Molly knew.

I moved my thumb so it settled on top of his hand. “Just that part, yeah. I never . . .” My eyes fogged, and my breath came out in quick shakes, “God, I never thought that she . . . That she would name her –”

I stopped myself, and I looked over at Sherlock with tears in my eyes. I didn’t have the words for how to tell him what all of this meant – that there was a little girl, a little girl named Theo, whose mom wouldn’t hit her, and whose dad wouldn’t pick up a gun. A little girl named Theo, whom I would get to watch grow up, would get to hold her hands as she learned to walk, and one day teach her how to build her own bed out of sanded wood, just like my dad had taught me. 

Would teach her the names of the Denali peaks, and the rivers, and all the stars.

That one day I would tell her about a special sled dog named Lugnut, and show her the picture of us I used to keep by the side of my bed. I would tell her the story of how her parents met, sitting around a Toklat campfire with hearts in their eyes. Would tell her the story of how I met Sherlock, an anonymous man in a suit leaping up uninvited into my truck.

And I didn’t have the words to tell Sherlock that . . . that if that little girl named Theo ended up like me . . . somehow, by pure chance. . . If the little girl named Theo ended up the way that I was, that I could be there. I could show that little kid how to shave, and tell them it would be ok, the same way I always wished, deep down, that someone had done for me. 

That, even though this would never actually happen, even though it was just the tiniest, invisible chance, that if they went to have that surgery, and no one else would go, that they wouldn’t wake up alone in a hospital room, because I would be there. I would hold their hand. I would tell the nurse if it hurt, if I could see that they were in too much pain.

I could do all of this, and they wouldn’t even have to change their name.

And I didn’t have the words to tell Sherlock how remarkable it was that I knew that Molly would let me be that person in Theo’s life, and that I knew that I would be wanted. That the both of us, that Sherlock and I, would be wanted.

“A little girl,” I whispered, in a choked voice, not even caring that my voice came out sounding too high.

Sherlock’s own eyes glistened, shining a breathtaking clear blue. They looked like the morning sky right before the sunrise as I rode the Greyhound bus across the Utah state line, when I’d finally glimpsed the sign that said just one-hundred miles left before Canyonlands, and I’d sucked in an excited breath even though it pulled at the fresh scars on my chest.

“She’s beautiful, John,” he said, and then I felt the deep sob finally wrench itself free from my chest, cascading down my cheeks, and moaning across my tongue.

I fell into his arms, and he held me.

Impossibly, he held me. 

And I knew, as I cried freely for the first time against his chest, not holding anything back, not trying to stifle the sound, that one day, one day soon, I would tell Sherlock about the time when I was six-years old, and my sister ran and tattled to my parents that I wouldn’t listen to her unless she called me Theo. And my dad had sat me down on the rickety metal steps outside our trailer, and thumped me on the back, and said, “ _Alright, now, what’s this about calling yourself Theo? A boy’s name, that is. Ain’t got no reason to be callin’ yourself that when you’ve got your own beautiful name. One your momma picked out just for you._ ”

I knew that I probably didn’t even have to tell him, that maybe he somehow already knew. But that I would tell him, just the same, because it was a story I never thought in a million years that I’d have someone to listen to.

For the first time in my entire life, I cried for the Watson’s younger daughter. For the fact that my dad said for ten years he always wanted a son, and when he finally realized he had one, he didn’t want it anymore.

I cried, quiet, wet sounds aching in my throat, and water in my eyes, because I knew that Sherlock Holmes would hold me up. He would keep me standing on my own two feet. 

A long time later, when my breathing had finally calmed, and I stood looking out at the fresh darkness with my cheek pressed against Sherlock’s chest, wrapped tightly in his arms, Sherlock squeezed me hard for a moment before he muttered into my hair, “You know, I believe I prefer the name John.”

And, surprisingly, I laughed, free and open, the sound echoing out into the fog. My puffy eyes were finally dry. I looked up to press a kiss to his cold cheek as I whispered back, “Of course you do.”

 

\--

 

I nudged Sherlock in the ribs to wake him up as the flight attendant made the announcement that the plane was starting to descend.

He hummed in his sleep and scrunched his eyes further closed, then shook his head and burrowed deeper beneath the thin plane blanket. I shook my head at him and turned back towards the window, gazing down at the vast sprawl of London slowly coming into view through the puffs of cloud.

It took my breath away. This city somehow looked ten times larger than even the New York I’d seen from the plane in my memories – massive and pulsing and impressively shimmering beneath the clear midday sun. I tracked the gradual appearance of the tops of soaring metal buildings, piercing up into the sky, as I thought back to the night before, huddled close in the cheap motel by the Fairbanks airport.

We’d ended up staying with Greg and Molly for nearly a week in the end, and after two days of Sherlock and I trying to leave to get out of their hair, not wanting to overstay our welcome or stress them out even more, Molly had finally huffed and said that if we left, her and Greg would die of exhaustion, or from killing each other, and that the two of us needed to stick around and make ourselves useful cooking and cleaning and babysitting before she’d ever let us get on a plane to London.

So one week later, after long goodbyes were made in the doorway, and after I’d choked up all over again watching Sherlock kiss Theo’s head as she slept against his chest, we hopped on the weekly winter run of the Alaska railroad, taking that into Fairbanks where we found the only available room left before our early morning flight to Seattle, where we could connect with a plane straight to London. 

That night, we’d both lain on our backs in the two tiny twin beds staring up at the ceiling, listening to each other breath. I knew I wasn’t going to sleep a wink that night, pulsing with energy thinking of Molly, of Theo, of London.

I startled at Sherlock’s voice in the darkness, whispered from a few feet away. “We’ll see them again soon. We’ll fly back once or twice – won’t have to wait until April.”

I smiled to myself in the dark, because of course Sherlock had seen the way I’d barely been able to tear my eyes away from the baby. Of course he had noticed the clench of my jaw on the train when it pulled away from the Denali station – the way Molly’s hand had clung to my sleeve until the last possible second when I stepped down off her porch.

I remembered he couldn’t see me and cleared my throat. “Yeah. Okay.”

Our voices sounded intimate in the darkness, even more so, somehow, for the fact that we were in separate beds, with empty old carpet in between us. 

I heard Sherlock’s sheets rustling, and the creak of his mattress, and before I could ask him what he was doing, I suddenly had the whole weight of his body crawling on top of me in the dark.

I huffed a laugh, clinging to his shoulders so he wouldn’t fall off the tiny bed. “Hell, Sherlock, there’s hardly enough room over here for me –”

“Quit whining and budge over,” he muttered, flailing himself to get comfortable under the scratchy hotel sheet.

I moved to the very edge of the mattress, part of my ass hanging off the side, and he curled himself up against my chest in my arms and sighed. 

“Oh, are you comfortable?” I asked him.

He pulled my arms tighter around him and mumbled, “Quite.”

I kissed the back of his neck, brushing my nose through his curls. I could feel him drifting off to sleep, and the thought of being alone in the room, the knowledge that he had wanted to sleep by my side, even here, even now, made me squeeze him to keep him awake.

“Tell me about London,” I whispered.

He yawned. “Already told you all about London. All winter. Practically the only thing to do for fun in your godforsaken cabin.”

I grinned and rolled my eyes in the dark, then rubbed my palm up over his chest. I pressed my fingertips to his heartbeat, counting the rhythm. “Tell me again,” I said, warm and deep in the dark.

He was silent for a few moments, so silent that I thought he’d gone and succumbed to sleep, but finally I heard the deep thrum of his voice, wrapping around my limbs in the darkness as if he held every bone in his strong hands. Vibrating deep in my own chest.

“Well, to start with,” he said, kissing the back of my hand in the dark, “I’ll need to warn you that I keep a wolf skull on the mantlepiece in my flat . . .”

The hard jolt of the plane startled me from my thoughts. I gripped the armrests in fear before I realized that we had just landed and were gliding smoothly to a stop. Sherlock grumbled next to me and stretched his legs from his near-eight-hour nap.

“I’m still tired,” he grumbled. The rest of the plane was becoming restless to get up out of their seats as we made our way to the gate.

“Well, by all means, feel free to just ride this back to Seattle,” I said. “Get another nap in so you won’t have to miss out on any sleep.”

He kicked my foot under the seats. I smirked.

The plane stopped, and the entire cabin stood up all at once in a frantic rush. We were there. We were there in London. My heart started to race in my chest. My palms sweat.

I didn’t even know what the city looked like, had never seen his place, didn’t know where to go. I didn’t know how to use the train system, what street he lived on, where to buy the nearest food. 

I took a deep breath, frustrated at myself, for the low hum of nerves and panic flowing through my system. My hands clenched the armrests. I didn’t even realize Sherlock was waiting for me to stand up until his hand touched my shoulder.

“John?” he said, as if he’d already called my name once before.

I looked at him. He’d changed at the beginning of the flight back into one of his suits – something I hadn’t seen on his body since that first day he appeared in my life in a parking lot. It hugged the lines of his body, made him look wondrous and otherworldly and alive. Competent and in control.

“John,” he said again, whispering, waiting for me. He looked worried.

I remembered the look on his face from back in Fairbanks, when we were walking into the airport to check in for our flight, and I’d suddenly held him back and pulled him off to the side.

“Look,” I’d said with a dry mouth, “My . . . there might be an issue before we get on. Sometimes there is . . . My – my ID. My passport. It’s not. . .well, you know, it isn’t –”

He’d looked at me as if I was the only other pair of eyes in the world. “Do you want me to stay by you?” he’d asked.

The thought filled me with warmth, until I realized . . . “No,” I’d said, as gently as I could. “No, I . . . I don’t want you to, to hear that. What they’ll say.” I swallowed hard, over the pain in my throat, remembering what had happened the last time I boarded a plane after the winter in the Canyon. “They’ll call me a different name. It’s . . . I just . . I don’t want you to hear that,” I said.

He’d nodded, so seriously it took my breath away. He didn’t look hurt at all. Not even offended that I hadn’t wanted him to be with me, to stay. 

“I could call my brother,” he said, leaning down to keep his voice low. “He could speak to someone before we go through, get that changed, and then you wouldn’t be asked, they wouldn’t say –”

“Thanks, but . . .” I glanced quickly around before reaching out to hold his hand in mine, just for a moment between our bodies. “Later, maybe,” I said, searching deep into his eyes. “I don’t even want to know how many laws he would be breaking to do that, but, right now, I just . . . I need to do this myself. Just, get it over with the way I’m used to.”

I waited, silent, willing him to understand. An eternal second passed before he squeezed my hand with his fingers. There was an unreadable expression on his face, something glowing in his eyes.

“I love you,” he’d whispered, so softly I could barely hear him over the noise of the airport.

And it was the sound of those words that had held my head high as I handed my ID over for our check-in, knowing Sherlock Holmes was waiting ten feet behind me, waiting to get on a plane by my side so he could share the other half of his life with me.

I looked up at Sherlock now, still hunched over in the aisle of the plane waiting for me to respond. It had only been a few seconds since he reached down to touch my shoulder. I smiled up at him and rose to my feet. “Sorry, just . . . zoned out there,” I said. I knew he could sense the white lie, but I gave him an assured nod. “Let’s go.”

-

I started to head for the line of taxis on the curb after we’d collected our few bags – the same duffel I’d brought to the Canyon, and Sherlock’s small suitcase stuffed with his outdoor gear and Denali clothes. It was unbelievable, like a dream, watching him deftly navigate us through the crowded airport now, with his designer suit, and his agile fingers, and his coiffed curls falling perfectly around his face. 

He was so far, a million miles away, from the mud-covered man I’d held to me and kissed out on the tundra in the rain. As if that man had been the caterpillar, and now he was the butterfly that had burst from the cocoon. 

But as he turned back to me and beckoned me away from the taxis with a nod of his head, towards a sleek black car I could see parked a little way down the sidewalk, I realized all at once that he was exactly the same. The very same man who had laughed as we fell half-way down a slope of moss and mud, and who had put his feet up on my truck dashboard as he listened to my bluegrass tapes, and who told me one night outside our small tent that wolves mate for life.

I knew all of that, so clearly, the same way I knew he would scoff at me for days if he ever knew the caterpillar metaphor I’d just used in my mind.

“What’s so humorous?” he asked as a man in a black suit took our luggage from our hands. 

I shook my head and grinned at him as I stepped down into the expensive car, deciding not to question the ‘how’ or the ‘why’. “Nothing,” I answered under my breath. He frowned at me as I rubbed a hand over my brimming smile. “Nothing at all.”

I stared out the window as we drove, gazing at the pulsing city, and Sherlock quietly pointed out buildings we were passing along the way – places he’d been and worked, restaurants where he’d eaten, streets he usually walked.

The buildings rose higher and higher, giant skyscrapers of glass and steel, reflecting the lights of the cars and the fading afternoon sun. It felt like we were driving into the center of the earth, the heartbeat of all bustling human life on the planet, as we eventually wound our way through the narrow London streets.

“I didn’t realize you lived so close to downtown?” I finally said.

He shot me a quick wink before reaching forward to tap on the glass for the driver. “Right here is perfect,” he said. The car immediately swerved over to the curb.

Sherlock didn’t respond at the odd look I shot him as he motioned for us to get out of the car. He pulled me back when I went to reach for our bags in the trunk. “He’ll take those on to our home,” he said, casually, as if he hadn’t just called a London apartment I’d never even seen yet “ _our home._ ”

It suddenly made sense in my mind – the expensive car and the man in the suit. “Your brother’s doing?” I guessed.

Sherlock shrugged as the car pulled away into the traffic. “Sometimes he makes himself useful.”

I continued watching the car disappear down the road as the city swarmed around me. The buildings towered and dwarfed me, and the endless tides of people rushed past us, jostling me where I stood, drowning everything in noise. I felt like I was disappearing into the chaos, evaporating into the giant hum, and I would never know my own name or hear silence ever again.

And yet somehow Sherlock stood as if set apart from it all. He stood gracefully in the chaos, arms behind his back, rising up out of the crowd with his long neck framed by the collar of his crisp white shirt.

I looked down quickly at my own clothes – my usual winter jacket and flannel shirt with old jeans – and grimaced.

“Don’t worry, no dress code where we’re headed,” he said, reading my thoughts. 

I looked up once more at the city as it enveloped me, snaking around my skin. It smelled of wet asphalt, and a million people, and the smog of the cars as they zoomed by. Nothing like the clear air of the tundra, the perfume of wildflowers, the warmth of the moss.

“Coming, Ranger?” I heard called from a few feet away. Sherlock was starting to walk into the massive crowd, away from the street.

I gave him a look. “Don’t tell me you’re going to call me that all the way out here,” I said, as I caught up to his side. We started to walk, and he kept his pace in tune with mine. “John will work just fine,” I said, under my breath. I swerved just in time to avoid a group of people barreling down the sidewalk. Sherlock stuck out an arm in front of me so I wouldn’t step off the curb down into the street after looking the wrong way.

He held his arm there against my chest for an extra moment. “Fine, then,” he said, as we waited for the light to change. His face was bright, full of the energy of the city pressing in against my limbs. “Will you come accompany me for a delicious Italian dinner, _John_?”

The light changed, and the mass of people around us started to move as I gazed back into his eyes. 

For one endless moment, everything else fell away. 

All that existed was Sherlock Holmes, standing in the streets of London, waiting patiently in his beautiful suit to take me with him to dinner. The bundle of nerves in my chest evaporated as I gazed back into his eyes, grounding me like Denali’s eternal peak in the middle of the moving chaos.

“Lead the way, Ranger,” I finally said to him, suddenly overwhelmed at his presence, at the fact that he had taken me there, was sharing it all with me – his own Denali.

He smiled at me, then beckoned with his head for me to come. His private grin brimmed over like the waters of the rushing Toklat after the first snowmelt of the spring, when everything was fresh, and new, and clean.

“John,” he whispered, audible over every sound in London. It was the sound of my entire life, my soul, my name.

And I followed him, in perfect sync by his side, into the blue skyscraper sea.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll be honest, this is the thing I have created in my life that I am most proud of, that has been the largest labor of love, and such a huge piece of my soul. Sharing my love for Alaska, for Denali, for the sled dogs, for these characters, with you all has been such a treasure.
> 
> Thank you for allowing me to share John's story. For the love, help, advice, feedback, support, recs, art, comments, and joy you all have given in response to his journey. Special thanks again to oxfordlunch, finnagain, smirkdoctor, and the handful of you who told me at con how this story has moved you. Thanks to happierstill and alexaprilgarden for letting me bounce ideas off you both, squee about rangers, and the endless emotional support. Thanks to my main squeezes annabagnell and songlin for making me laugh when I was writing the most heart-wrenching chapters of this fic, and for screaming at me in joy (and angst) after they read each one.
> 
> A few quick things before I bid y'all adieu:
> 
> Feel free to draw/paint any fanart of this universe that you wish, just share it with us all so we can go bananas over it!
> 
> One day, when I see her play live again, I will work up the courage to tell Sarah Jarosz that her music inspired an entire book. I'll let y'all know when I do :)
> 
> A reminder that John Watson's journey is not the same as every trans man's journey, and that every trans person has their own unique experiences and voice.
> 
> If you want to read some more fics featuring trans characters in Sherlock fandom, check out the July episode of Three Patch Podcast, where I'll be chatting with songlin and finnagain about the glorious wonders of Sherlock fics featuring more trans characters! Along with some excellent recs you can (and should definitely) check out.
> 
> As for what's next for me, I WILL be finishing Gallant Darling, Pray for Me! As well as starting on a new fic that the illustrious drinkingcoco won from me in the 2018 Fandom Trumps Hate auction. If Winter Olympics OT3 Johnlockstrade sounds cool to you (lol, see what I did there?) then keep an eye out for when that starts posting!
> 
> Until then, come say hi on the social medias, and say hello in the comments! Fics like these are true labors of love to write, and my highest joy is getting to interact with you all and talk about it via comments once it's finished. Now that the fic is done, I can start replying to comments left here again. Hurrah! 
> 
> See ya down below :)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Cover for The Bluest of Blue](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14109717) by [11jane11](https://archiveofourown.org/users/11jane11/pseuds/11jane11)
  * [[Cover] The Bluest of Blue](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14687700) by [allsovacant](https://archiveofourown.org/users/allsovacant/pseuds/allsovacant)




End file.
